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Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

degoogle.jmoore.dev

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Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#71

Post by heavyset_go »

submeta wrote: post #56
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…

Same here: Migrated all my gmail accounts to Fastmail. Took me two days. Migrated Google Docs to Dropbox. And replaced Google Sheets and Doc with a Microsoft subscription (MS Word and MS Excel). Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind. Finally there is youtube for me. Ai…

> Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind.

Try Searx[1]. It's a search engine aggregator that works with DDG, Google, and dozens of other search engines. You can self-host it or use one of the public instances.

[1] https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#72

Post by gonehome »

gabruoy wrote: post #57
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…

Newpipe has completely replaced my Youtube usage since I mostly use it on mobile, and it lets you save your subscriptions locally. Its actually really nice and imo superior to the dumbed down Youtube app used nowadays anyway. Freetube is the same idea but for desktop, but I've found it to be much buggier in using it, so I occasionally just use youtube in a private tab and directly search for a video on desktop, usual…

It’s less about the product to me and more about the content.

YouTube has the content I want to watch, creators that use YouTube rely on it for their revenue and recommendation algorithm.

Until that problem is fixed the alternatives won’t work.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#73

Post by sosborn »

aitchnyu wrote: post #67

I never considered a Gmail alternative since Gmail has primary/social/promotion/updates tabs and proper threading of replies and almost perfect spam protection. What services do the above things as good?

I’m with you on the SPAM protection, but I find the tabs and threading to be god awful.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#74

Post by gonehome »

dheera wrote: post #64
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…

How do you deal with work situations that want you to use Google Hangouts, Docs, or Calendar?

I’m lucky that I don’t have any of that at work.

If I did I would need a google account just for that purpose.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#75

Post by Scarbutt »

submeta wrote: post #56
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…

Same here: Migrated all my gmail accounts to Fastmail. Took me two days. Migrated Google Docs to Dropbox. And replaced Google Sheets and Doc with a Microsoft subscription (MS Word and MS Excel). Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind. Finally there is youtube for me. Ai…

Hasn't firefox been defunded and likely to no have a future?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#76

Post by submeta »

XCSme wrote: post #68
submeta wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here: Migrated all my gmail accounts to Fastmail. Took me two days. Migrated Google Docs to Dropbox. And replaced Google Sheets and Doc with a Microsoft subscription (MS Word and MS Excel). Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind. Finally there is youtube for me. Ai…

Is Microsoft Office really so much better than Google Docs in terms of privacy? Or is mostly just the "I hate Google, others are probably better" idea?

I received many documents in that format in the past. Actually that isn’t the case anymore. I just have thousands of legacy documents in doc/x and xlsx format on my computer. Other than that I don‘t use MS Word to create documents anymore. I prefer Emacs/Org + pandoc.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#77

Post by nickelpro »

XCSme wrote: post #70
nickelpro wrote: post #61

Genuinely, why should I care? What harm is likely to happen to my life by sticking with Google, a service provider I find convenient? EDIT: I don't want to be accused of fan-boying or astro-turfing. I just see "Avoid Big Company X because they collect your data" a lot and I just can't give a damn about companies collecting my data. Be my guest, if it means I get free stuff. My data is boring tech nerd data, use it to…

I think the biggest problem is Google becoming a monopoly, when you rely daily on tens of their services. Than, if for some reason, they decide to close your account or use your data to "be evil", there's not much you can do.

Is there a history of Google de-activating accounts arbitrarily? I agree this would be a huge problem, but I'd be similarly devastated if my ISP stopped doing business with me, or any other email provider if I wasn't on gmail.

True, if Google deactivated my account I'd lose a little bit more than just gmail, but any company I do business with arbitrarily cutting me off would be on the same magnitude of problematic. That seems like a risk you take just by doing business with third-parties at all.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#78

Post by dorchadas »

flurdy wrote: post #31

I also blogged a fortnight ago about the same degoogling process. https://blog.flurdy.com/2020/08/degoogling.html My problem as I mention is that I am at the same time regoogling...

Yep. I'd love to degoogle my personal stuff, but my work stuff has to be Google (I'm a teacher, and all our stuff is run through Google). Plus, my university alumni account is through Google, which would be annoying to change as that's how I've gotten in touch with a lot of useful contacts I've made.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#79

Post by ashtonkem »

submeta wrote: post #56
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…

Same here: Migrated all my gmail accounts to Fastmail. Took me two days. Migrated Google Docs to Dropbox. And replaced Google Sheets and Doc with a Microsoft subscription (MS Word and MS Excel). Then there‘s the search engine. I tried hard to replace Google Search with DDG, but I have to admit that Google gives me better search results. Still I would love to leave this also behind. Finally there is youtube for me. Ai…

DDG works well enough for me on anything but programming. The moment I need to search for anything programming related, Google works much better for me.
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