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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

#91

Post by mehrdadn »

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…

Do you use complicated Gmail filters? What did you use instead of them after migrating? Also, any Google Apps Scripts?

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#92

Post by hellofunk »

gonehome wrote: post #69
actuator wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I have a MacBook and it’s great, I also have an iPhone. It’s the business model that matters to me more. It’s not a “hate on big companies” thing. In fact the big software companies usually have better security (google included) because they have some of the world’s best security people. I try to avoid companies that have an incentive to collect user information for ad targeting. Apple doesn’t have that (and they’ve…

> Gmail was great when it came out, but today it’s a pretty mediocre product.

Gmail has actually gotten super slow to me, I'm not sure what the problem is. Their site loads slowly, navigating around it is slow, the whole UX is slow. It didn't used to be that way. I've considered migrating for that reason alone, let alone any opinion I have of the company.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#93

Post by colordrops »

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…

If it's about privacy, you can still use google search through various proxy search engines as others have mentioned.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#94

Post by gonehome »

mehrdadn wrote: post #91
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…

Do you use complicated Gmail filters? What did you use instead of them after migrating? Also, any Google Apps Scripts?

No google apps scripts for me so I didn’t have to deal with that.

My email style is inbox everything and route emails to folders or delete on read.

If there’s something I’m always routing without reading then I unsubscribe.

Workflow may not be for everyone, but it keeps my email under control and organized.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#95

Post by actuator »

hellofunk wrote: post #92
gonehome wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a MacBook and it’s great, I also have an iPhone. It’s the business model that matters to me more. It’s not a “hate on big companies” thing. In fact the big software companies usually have better security (google included) because they have some of the world’s best security people. I try to avoid companies that have an incentive to collect user information for ad targeting. Apple doesn’t have that (and they’ve…

> Gmail was great when it came out, but today it’s a pretty mediocre product. Gmail has actually gotten super slow to me, I'm not sure what the problem is. Their site loads slowly, navigating around it is slow, the whole UX is slow. It didn't used to be that way. I've considered migrating for that reason alone, let alone any opinion I have of the company.

Yeah, Gmail hasn't become that fast with loading etc. considering how much internet has improved. That is one place where I think they can improve a lot.

It also might be related to all the smart auto compose/grammar features they have been adding, which do really improve your workflow but might add just more resources to load/parse on page load.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#96

Post by neckardt »

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…

Is fastmail the best email service provider these days? I switched my own domain to them a while ago, but then abandoned it when I heard about the new laws in Australia.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#97

Post by gonehome »

gabruoy wrote: post #82
gonehome wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Newpipe and Freetube are YouTube frontends, so all the content is there just without having to sign in. If you only really use a subscriptions list and directly related videos as your way to find youtube content, it's a drop in replacement. If you want to use google's recommendation algorithm though,I don't think anyone is going to be able to recreate that experience any time soon.

Thanks, that’s good to know - I’ll check those out.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#98

Post by XCSme »

nickelpro wrote: post #77
XCSme wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

I remember seeing a few cases of Google account de-activation every year. Not sure how often it happens, but it does happen. I personally use Gmail and really like it, I don't expect to have any problems with them, but I do know that my account being deleted at some point for no reason is a real possibility.

I think that email is a bigger problem as it's the main connection between you and all the other services you use online. Lose your email address? You're going to have a hard time recovering the accounts on all the other services.

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#99

Post by jaynetics »

nickelpro wrote: post #77
XCSme wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. T…

> Is there a history of Google de-activating accounts arbitrarily?

Yes.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aycombinator.com+%22google%2...

Re: Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life

#100

Post by submeta »

the_af wrote: post #89
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…

Out of curiosity, what's the benefit of replacing Google Docs with Dropbox? I seem to remember HN's readership is occasionally hostile to Dropbox. Myself, I use it but the same drive that would have me ditch Google would also make me ditch Dropbox... (I haven't reached that point, though)

My first impulse was to move away from everything google. I don‘t know much about any wrong-doings of Dropbox. Maybe I need to do some research.
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