So... I've read some things lately about the big evil G that have put me into unease. The problem is, I use Google for absolutely everything right now, and have for as long as Google has existed. It's tied into everything and I need to break free.
These are the Google things I use regularly:
Email - Gmail (I have many years of email that I've saved in my account)
Browser - Chrome (including saving my passwords)
Writing - Docs (I need collaborative capabilities and a place to safely save my work)
Spreadsheets - Sheets (used for organizing various things, collaborative options are very needed and used often)
My phone is even a Google Pixel phone, of course running Android and integrated into everything I do.
I am not very tech savvy. I need user-friendly, reliable, relatively easy to learn options for everything I use, and I have zero idea where to begin.
I've done searches online for alternatives, but nothing is really standing out to me as being a good replacement. If you have any ideas for me (and dear god let them please be free or have reasonable pricing) please let me know.
"I have a hard time believing that YouTube would be unable to keep business afloat without the revenue generated by behavioral-tracking advertisements,” EFF’s Daly Barnett told @theregister. “It’s a lazy and deliberately malicious move on their part." https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/16/youtube_ad_blocking/
I'm trying to ditch google workspace. This is all for personal use, and I ended up in the Workspace system because of it's wild evolution over the last 15ish years (I originally signed up for their email hosting service, before drive or anything like that existed)
While I have moved almost everything to self-hosted I'm still left with a feeling that I'm forgetting something critical.
I've gotten all of my data off of drive/photos, and I know that we will lose everything related to our accounts (play store purchases, any websites/apps specifically tied to the account and not simply email address)
I'm still unsure of what to do about email, though. I want nothing to do with managing my own email server, and would love to have a mail app (web and phone) that's fairly similar to gmail.
Beyond that, are there any small things I might be missing? The little bits that are easily overlooked, but will cause catastrophic problems?
At least workers around the world who refuse to support Zionist entity are not lonely heroes. They became a movement.
Total #bds will bring Zionist entity to its knees. https://newsie.social/@LALegault/112047813887013601
google images is filled with ai-generated garbage. news is stuffed with twitter/x links and a ton of other non-news results. searches often give you back a bunch of useless seo-optimized pages made for ad revenue. it’s a failure, and they want us to believe a chatbot is the fix.
The Swiss government is also apparently conducting mass surveillance of its citizens, but @protonmail and @Tutanota , which uses end-to-end encryption and is open source and transparent, should have no problem.
Final, privacy is not determined by the country where they are based, but by encryption and transparency.
Does google's "verbalize to screenreader" just... not work? It's a huge list of options and I've tried two OSes and literally nothing happens when I click it?
@ZachWeinersmith You should look into #degoogle ing. Google products are the people that use their "services" which keep getting worse and less useful.
Article seems pretty flawed. Relevance is a vague metric, and the author relies pretty heavily on data related to government site visitation, which seems subject to bias toward certain types of users....
Before the new year, I donated 25€ for Firefox, my long-time companion to #degoogle Grapheneos and Linux. Although Google is introducing DRM, I don't think anything is so important in this life that I have to use Chrome or IE, I will adapt to the situation and instead of worrying about DRM (of course, for the public Internet, this seems like a total violation of users' rights, for safety 🤣🤣🤣, really?) I will try to be more social, but not in the sense of social networks, but hanging out with friends or listening to music or running or a good book... I definitely don't want this big corporation near me, which we are more and more they control... (google,ms,apple,amazon...) Firefox probably missed by not insisting on FirefoxOS (phones), but it has a great agenda - privacy and simplicity. I look forward to many years of using FF!!
I've found my new favorite android app, I was scrolling through F-Droid and saw canta which lets you uninstall system apps and bloat without rooting or using a separate computer. I used it to de-google my Samsung phone and remove the Samsung and Microsoft bloat. I definitely recommend trying it 😁
https://halotan.net/blog/what-5-years-of-voluntary-facebook-exile-taught-me.html
Co ja ze śmietnika wygrzebałem... Grzebałem w poszukiwaniu starych brzmień instustralnych jakich słuchałem za czasów bycia nastolatkiem.
Zacząłem grzebać i trafiłem na ten wpis... Który bardzo ostro wypowiada się o mainstreamowych social mediach. I uwykukla różnicę pomiędzy zwykłymi użytkownikami social media a twórcami... Ironicznie mimo że to ta grupa najchętniej by rzuciła korpo sociale w diabły, to właśnie mali twórcy są od nich najbardziej uzależnieni, a wręcz dla nich obecność na korpo-socialach to być albo nie być.
Dla osoby która nie jest twórcą może to być ciekawa choć bolesna lektura...
Bowiem czuję że dla wielu twórców te odczucia będą dobrze znane a nawet już mogły ich nie raz kopnąć w tyłek.
Historii z blokiem od YouTube ciąg dalszy. Okazało się, że uBlock jest niewykrywany przez YT i mogę normalnie oglądać filmy, gdy tylko wyłączę dodatek do uBlocka.
Żeby było zabawniej, to dodatek dzięki któremu dodawałem kanały ulubionych twórców do whitelisty pozwalającej na wyświetlanie na nich reklam xD
Chromium i pochodne są bezpieczne. Jest kilka forków, które po prostu eliminują zły kod od Google (na Android polecam Bromite, na desktopy i iOs ungoogled-chromium czy Iridium). Zagrożenie jest gdzie indziej: z takich przeglądarek może się nie dać korzystać z usług Google.
Więc sporo osób może je porzucić (przeglądarki, nie usługi Google 😉 ).
Chyba że rewolucja #degoogle zajdzie tak daleko, że ludziom nie będzie się chciało dla tych usług rezygnować z prywatności. Lub że ustawodawstwo UE zadziała tak, jak w przypadku Microsoft.
🇫🇷 Les listes de front-end alternatifs que j'ai pu trouver sur internet étant très peu à jour, j'en ai démarré une nouvelle.
N'hésitez pas à me faire des suggestions sur Codeberg ou ici.
🇬🇧 As the lists of alternative front ends I've found on the internet are not very up-to-date, I've started a new one. Feel free to make suggestions on Codeberg or here.
The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance ( www.zdnet.com )
Article seems pretty flawed. Relevance is a vague metric, and the author relies pretty heavily on data related to government site visitation, which seems subject to bias toward certain types of users....