Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

degoogle.jmoore.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

641–650 of 665 posts

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#641

Post by grey_earthling »

patrick451 wrote: post #604
pineaux wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why use epic and edge when you can haves Firefox? My experience with Mozilla has always been great. It might be marginally slower than chrome, but I don't notice and they have great features and it's open source

I have used firefox for a long time. Their continued insistence on forced automatic updates is quickly becoming a deal a breaker. Even putting aside my philosophical objections to this practice (let me update my software when I want on my own damn machine), it is exceptionally frustrating when those updates with forced restarts perpetually occur in the middle of the workday.

On Linux Firefox gets updated the same way as any other package, which almost always gives you more manual control than this.

I suppose I'm saying this is a complaint about macOS and/or Windows, rather than about Firefox as such ;)

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#642

Post by ekianjo »

throwaway936482 wrote: post #415
ekianjo wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say the same thing for anything based outside of the US. You think China-based services don't have the CCP spy on their users, like TikTok?

Yeah but if you're an American you probably have more to worry about if American intelligence agencies and law enforcement are spying on you than if it's the Chinese and vice versa

You think China's reach does not extend outside of its frontiers?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#643

Post by AdrianB1 »

toastal wrote: post #471
stilisstuk wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not an alternative, bit insidious is aborter frontend to YouTube... and om Android there is newpipe. However, for me, the problems are: Maps. Google Maps are great. Calendar: my calender provider online has ICS calendar sharing, not e.g. itip.and imip.

I decided to start becoming an active contributor to OpenStreetMap. If a business isn't on the map, I just ask whoever works there a series of questions and upload the new POI. Some of the maps, like those in Bangkok actually mapped out a lot of footpaths that say go through a mall that save a ton of time walking vs Google Maps.

I am also a contributor to OSM, but it does not replace the need for Waze, for example. They are partially redundant, but not completely interchangeable.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#644

Post by chris_f »

fiatjaf wrote: post #630
chris_f wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Any idea why Runnaroo gives you better results than DDG? It doesn't seem to have better data sources. Not necessarily better data sources, but different data sources and a slightly different approach. For organic results, the biggest different is that Runnaroo uses Google as the base for web results (similar to Startpage) where DDG uses Bing. Outside of the organic results, Runnaroo's strategy is to integrate result…

Is it ok to get Google results like that?

>Is it ok to get Google results like that?

It is. We integrate the Google results through their web search API, and comply with their usage terms of service (as we do with all the data partners we integrate).

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#645

Post by yakri »

actuator wrote: post #63
gonehome wrote: post #17

I dropped all google services and it wasn’t that hard. The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail). Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is. On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do…

I know it is easy to hate on big companies but how do you leave them when credible alternatives are not even close in productivity/performance. I tried leaving Macbook, but whenever I have tried the alternatives(even Thinkpad with Ubuntu), Macbook still seems to be at the sweet spot of life time ownership cost/performance. I do care about repairability, good keyboards etc. but I do have to look at things in balance.…

You don't unless you have a practical reason to.

Now some aspects of how businesses conduct business is somewhat of a "practical reason."

For example, even if Apple products actually provided decent cost/performance ratio, I would never switch over to them because of how hostile they are to leaving their ecosystem. I don't have a huge problem, as a user, with more nebulous complaints about hostile business practices and the like. The issue is simply that it would be a pain in the ass for me personally, and require making a lot of annoying compromises, or swapping to more, and less effective apple hardware.

Like if we roll back the clock to 2015 when MBP's are probably hands down the best business laptops, from a hardware standpoint I'd love one compared to alternative laptops, and at least for a work-only computer when I have zero other devices and interactions to worry about, it could be a decent option.

Don't like some of the ways they do business? Who cares, I'm not going to shoot myself in the foot on general principle.

The difference with google services is a lot more stark though, there's nothing I would even remotely consider competition to gmail now, and the things were only worse when gmail first came out. These days migrating would be an absolute nightmare. I'd still do it if someone offered me a way better option, but people in this thread are talking about downgrading to some shite service on general principle, causing themselves significant pain in the ass in order to give some other company that definitely does not give a shit about acting in some morally upstanding way money, for a lower quality product.

There's no replacement for youtube, and frankly video services are are starting to look like a natural monopoly to dwarf all prior uses of the term, as youtube could never survive outside of google's business model, and can't be split up without just destroying it completely.

So anyway, I don't think people are being all that honest about their "switch from google" being ever so easy and worthwhile. Personally I lose a lot by swapping purely because the alternatives are shit, so I won't be doing it.

People switching from android to iPhone because "goOgLe bAd" are the height of irony though.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#646

Post by newsbinator »

toastercat wrote: post #108
gonehome wrote: post #17

I dropped all google services and it wasn’t that hard. The most tedious part is moving accounts from your gmail to your new email (I switched to using my own domain backed by fastmail). Even with a password manager and a list of all my accounts this took me an entire day. You also learn how terrible most non-software company account management is. On a lot of sites changing email is impossible. On some it lets you do…

I also moved all my e-mail off Gmail and onto Migadu using my own domains. This ensures that even if Migadu goes under, I could swifty move to another service and keep my same e-mail addresses (for the record, Migadu is awesome). Like you mentioned in another comment, it did take me some time to move all my accounts over (about 2 days worth), but I'm so happy I did.

Migadu just announced today they're getting rid of the free plan. The next plan up that supports multiple domains is $19/yr and unlimited domains would be $29/mo.

I had been keeping on there my side-project domains, which didn't really need a full gSuite backing them, since only a handful of emails would go in or out per month.

If Migadu's were a more reasonable price, I would have shrugged and upgraded. But going from $0/mo to $29/mo is a stretch.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#647

Post by henearkr »

bad_user wrote: post #640
henearkr wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case you don't need to ditch Gmail, they don't use anymore this data to custom ads. However each time you visit any website, your enemies are not only Google Ads but also Criteo, Facebook, etc (and they are much much less conscientious than Google about how they use and distribute the fruits of this harvest).

I agree. But I still think it's worth it to ditch Gmail, or at least the free version. People need to own their online identity. The email address should be on your own domain, because Google can change the service and their terms of use on a whim, and if you're tied to a @gmail.com address, your only option for keeping your email address is to go along with it. If you like Gmail, then at least pay for Google Suite a…

Ah good point, not to ditch gmail but to ditch the "@gmail" domain name. That makes sense, thanks.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#648

Post by chapium »

jackson1442 wrote: post #595
chapium wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recovering a gmail account is pretty impossible, at least that story had a happy ending.

I mean honestly, I don't mind that as long as it isn't a problem concerning recovering your account after an account takeover. If a potential hijacker can't get into my account through social engineering, great.

Why have account recovery at all then?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#649

Post by toastal »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #643
toastal wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I decided to start becoming an active contributor to OpenStreetMap. If a business isn't on the map, I just ask whoever works there a series of questions and upload the new POI. Some of the maps, like those in Bangkok actually mapped out a lot of footpaths that say go through a mall that save a ton of time walking vs Google Maps.

I am also a contributor to OSM, but it does not replace the need for Waze, for example. They are partially redundant, but not completely interchangeable.

Oh, I sold my car a couple years ago so these features aren't as useful to me now

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#650

Post by gonehome »

rorykoehler wrote: post #511
ekianjo wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agree with you on this -> The only google service that is really relevant and hard to replace is YouTube. Agree. It would become a little easier if all major broadcasters would at least mirror their youtube content on other networks like Peertube. That would not solve the recommendation problem to discover new videos, but at least the hosting itself would be taken care off this way.

YouTube recommendations are really annoying. I don’t want to see 50 million variations of the same video. Impossible to discover new concepts etc

I'm not a fan either.

Creators rely on them to drive traffic though and that's part of what makes YouTube sticky for producers.

The creators remain incentivized to use YouTube as a platform because they can leverage the recommendation algorithms to drive traffic to their content.

While this remains true YouTube is here to stay.

People will go to where the content is. The content will go to the platform that makes it easiest for them to build an audience.

Post reply on HN