As much as I would like to agree, as a user who has DDG as the default search engine, this is not my experience... DDG consistently gives me useless results when I search for less popular languages results (searching Dart, or the search-friendly dartlang, gives me crap every time, while Google finds stuff easily... sure, Dart is by Google, that may be a factor, but if I remember correctly, results for Groovy and very new languages like Unison are a lot better at Google) I unavoidably have to use !g to turn to Google. To the point where when I am at work and cannot afford wasting time, I use Google by default.
I just searched for "dart" on ecosia and the programming language showed up on the first page of results. I also have bad luck with duck duck go, but I think ecosia proves that the only reason bing is bad is because Microsoft is incompetent
Good point, it's possible to send a request to add a bang, but it would be better if there were an interface like in Chrome or Firefox to set up own searches.
I do prefer not leaving all my data with Google though to combine with other activities of which I may or may not know of and I think it's good to use alternative services as much as possible, especially when I use Google just as an interface to surface information from site like Wikipedia or Stackexchange.
(note I'm not affiliated with DDG, I just also went through the process of De-Googling after Inbox was shut down)
I'm sad to have to agree. I tried ddg as my primary search engine for about 3 months. By the third month I was just adding !g by default because I just wanted results without testing quality first. Then I realized how silly it was to use it for almost every search, which I'd been doing for about a week, and switched back.
Cannot reproduce this -- Searched DDG for 'dartlang' and all links on the first page relate to dart programming language.
Also google having more results you are looking for sometimes doesn't mean you can't have DDG as your default search. Just enter 'dartlang !g' when you want to search google.
Don't you guys use an ad blocker? I barely see any ads since I started using uBlock. Occasionally I browse without an ad blocker and the experience is horrible and intimidating. Actually ads and propaganda were the reasons I quit TV around 10 years ago and I have never regretted it. So much time and mental energy is freed up to do constructive and fulfilling things (e.g. reading books, sports, socializing, musing etc).
Been avoiding internet ads and tracking for 15 years now. I feel like the unibomber. Facebook and google probably still have a good fingerprint on me, though, due to iOS not letting you use good ad blockers.
Something uncanny happened recently in terms of the ads I do see that gave me quite a bit of paranoia. My SO recently bought a distinct pair of leggings. How am I seeing ads for that same exact pair of leggings, on my phone? I don't think I've ever typed out the word leggings on the internet before this very comment.
But you live in the same household, and probably use the same internet connection, as someone who did likely search for and buy leggings. They use this information when correlating.
Unabomber not Unibomber, not that it matters. Ted Kaczynski, the man you are referring to is a fascinating man, try to ignore all of the recent hype and delusion following that Netflix series. I encourage everyone to read his book "Industrial Society and Its Future", he is without a doubt a luddite but presents some very compelling reasons in the book, if nothing else it will give you some insight into a rather notorious but perhaps unfairly represented character.
I got rid of cable tv. Was spending $80 a month ($960/year) for something that’s mostly previously taped.
Best decision ever!
The problem, is that during a pandemic or crisis, you sorta miss the cable news. Local TV broadcasts are not as sufficient, but at least I can get some good digital signal coverage for a few channels.
DDG’s definition of “global” is essentially “American” though. Presenting results exclusively for Worcester, MA, when I search for “Worcester” from a UK IP address (near Worcester, Worcestershire) isn’t being global, it’s being dumb.
It comes up every time DDG is discussed on HN and I don’t understand why they don’t fix it. It’s the main thing that keeps me using Bing on my phone.
Worcester has a higher population than England's Worcester, and as such probably has more backlinks to pages related to it. That is global. Expecting global results to be regionalized is silly; just use regionalized results.
That's a very engineer-focused way of looking at it.
I don't care about backlinks or population or whatever weighting DDG uses: I want relevant results. DDG is a user-facing search engine, not a tech demo. Showing a UK visitor three pages of results about Worcester, MA is simply bad UX.
Then use regional results! I, personally, am not an engineer. I'm a person who has an actual use for 'global' results, and my main reason for using DuckDuckGo is the ability to not have regional results.
If you want relevant results, don't use the global weighting. Use the UK weighting. That's why it's there. Literally so people with your preference of localized results can have localized results.
Now I set the region to the UK, I would expect the more relevant results. It shows the map for the US Worcester and mixed results again, but differently mixed:
When I do it from the UK, with localisation on I get a whole page of links on the UK Worcester, with it off the hits are mostly the US one, but the Wikipedia page like is still UK.
YMMV, of course, but this search works fine for me.
For me all results are worse, computer science or not.
DDG completely ignores my country or when it doesn't, the results are misclassified. And you can forget about local searches, DDG being worse than useless for those.
What strikes me as odd is that DDG is worse for computer science results too.
DDG often ignores search terms that Google doesn't. And which terms it ignores is a complete guess, so you do this back and forth putting relevant query words in quotes to try and force it.
I use DDG as my default search engine, but there's no point in denying the obvious. UI might be nice, but UI is unimportant.
That’s odd, because from my experience, it’s Google that’s constantly ignoring my search terms. With Google, I often had to quote “every” “single” “keyword” when it came to searching for computer science stuff. With DDG, not as much.
DDG returns mostly Norwegian results when I set the region to Denmark. I get that our languages are very closely related and thus hard to tell apart, but it does get annoying.
That is funny. The thing that annoy me most when writing in Norwegian on DDG is that most results are from Denmark, often including did you mean "Danish spelling for the same word"
I use DDG as my default, and I do like the bang syntax - in fact, it wouldn't be my default otherwise.
I find when searching for manuals on devices, for example, there are lots of garbage results or PDF spam sites that I would not recommend people click.
The other night I searched a question (I forget what) and the entire first page was Quora links to possibly the same question over and over, and not the question I asked.
Firefox is now objectively better than Chrome in every way. I would recommend switching moral reasons aside. Chrome's memory management is abysmal. I now get the same shudder when I see someone with chrome on their machine that I used to get when I saw someone running Internet Explorer (which may even be better than chrome now too).
I wish this were true but certainly on Linux I don't find this to be the case. I periodically try switching to Firefox and always end up back on Chrome for performance reasons.
Features wise I prefer Firefox (containers are amazing, extra privacy features/blockers by default nice, the new picture in picture for video is nice, dev tools have a lot of cool extra features etc), but Firefox often struggles and stutters for me, whereas I rarely have issues with Chrome.
The devtools are a good example, sometimes just having them open on a page I am developing slows everything down. Closing/re-opening the tab seems to fix it for a bit but then it just starts to happen again, Chrome's devtools are always snappy. Similary if I want to inspect an element on a page Chrome never has a problem doing it instantly, Firefox has to think about it for a while.
In general everything that uses the GPU I find far faster in Chrome. The other day for instance I was working on a d3 SVG visualization that strained Firefox but was no problem for Chrome, canvas performance is similar but not as bad in my experience. The most common offender is trying to watch a video: in Firefox everything slows down and the fans spin up, in Chrome no effect.
It is also true that all Google services that I am unfortunately tied to (GMail, Maps, Calendar etc) are snappy in Chrome and like molasses in Firefox...
My experience is exactly the opposite. When forced to use Chromium on Linux, I find it slow. The dev tools are lacking basic functionality that I came to depend on, and they are unreliable (missing requests in Network tab). When testing CSP protections about a year ago, Chromium allowed many of the requests that should have been blocked (and were, in Firefox).
I think it comes down to what one is used to. We probably learn to sidestep problems with any browser we use, but using a different browser inevitably leads to frustration.
Of course, this is not true if you are using Google services. Google seems to put an extra effort in making sure that their pages are as slow as possible in Firefox... I don't care much myself as I don't use them, but it's a good reminder of how (non)non-evil they have become.
Interesting... It has gotten a lot better over the past few years. The Google issue is not a deal-breaker for me, want to move away from GMail/Calendar for my personal account anyway.
Will probably try to make the switch again at some point.
Before I say this, I would just like to say I run Firefox as often as I can and love love love it, but chrome is better, due entirely to the market share of the Blink web engine. Microsoft Teams' webapp only works in Blink. Hulu bitches about widevine until Firefox gives me the notification to enable it. Canvas (that thing all us students use) gets random rendering errors on gecko that makes the UI malfunction a lot.
People mention that more people should use Firefox because google controls the Blink engine and Gecko is the only real competitor, and if Blink has too high of market share, than google can add exclusive functionality to blink for developers to use, edging all other browsers out of the market.
I would absolutely switch to Safari or Firefox except for the fact that I find Chrome's tab system to be so good.
Chrome tabs load and appear instantly. As you add more tabs they shrink down to a tiny but still usable favicon size. As you close tabs they resize well and with nice little UX behavior like the next close button always appearing directly under your mouse. They close and re-open instantly.
When you press enter in the address bar Chrome always loads your Search, unlike Safari, which often requires second press, or weirdly loses focus. Even doing simple web search feels so slow and broken in Safari tabs. When you have a moderate number of tabs Safari switches to this horizontal scrolling mode where half of your tabs are no longer visible. Basically unusable.
Chrome tabs are so good compared to the standard macOS tabs found in places like Safari and Finder. I wish I could have them everywhere.
Firefox with tree style tabs is on another level. Firefox also supports lazy loading tabs when restarted, so only pinned tabs and tabs you view consume resources.
I have nearly 1000 tabs open in Firefox and navigate them extremely efficiently. Does chrome do that?
I don't really want/need to use a new horizontal tab paradigm that supports thousands of tabs. I just want a really good implementation of the standard top-of-the-window tab bar.
I was lured in initially by the novelty. But it has become an amazing tool for organizing myself. When I browse HN, I shift-click on everything interesting, and it automatically gets organized into a nice collapsible tree.
When I am working on a project, I move search results, project pages, and relevant info to a single tree.
I leave other things open indefinitely, which effectively replaces bookmarks.
(To anyone who plans to try it, you may need to edit userChrome.css to turn off the top tabs; there's guides on this. I also recommend tweaking TST's settings, imposing a limit on nesting, and preventing auto switching tabs )
I tried to switch to Firefox, in large part because of the contianers, and I still use it in some places, but the thing that really got me was battery usage. I switched my desktop at work to Firefox, and it was great, and I still use it there, but then I switched by work laptop to Firefox, and (according to powertop and htop) the battery and CPU usage of Firefox was probably 3-4x Chrome. This is a total deal breaker on a laptop.
Firefox's JavaScript engine is still slower and large JavaScript apps become sluggish more quickly.
Also, I still haven't found a way to let users download files from JavaScript (e.g. through a button click that invokes a function) in Firefox, that wouldn't open another window and in the process close their websocket connection.
This was true (I no longer use Chrome and don’t know if it’s improved in the last two years). Chrome needed enormous amounts of memory compared to Firefox. Using RAM is not an issue as such, but it makes other applications running at the same time miserable (and the user too).
It's worth pointing out that Google cripples its apps in Firefox intentionally and since Edge is now basically Chrome, MS probably, (perhaps unintentionally?), follows suit.
Unfortunately the Firefox codebase itself is the only marketing tool at work here. I still use Firefox for everything else, not least due to the fact it isn't trying to swindle every last private detail out of me, but for work stuff and gaming (O365/GCloud) I don't really care about any of that.
Hiding behind lies and random personal attacks will not make Firefox better, but comparisons to its main competitor in key areas might help
I’m not seeing a lie. Google intentionally cripples/degrades software in Firefox. Hell, Google degrades YouTube viewed in iOS Safari because they want me to install the app.
I occasionally have Firefox freeze due to some site's script freezing, forcing me to end it through task manager as Firefox won't respond to any button clicks.
Also (unless I missed something) there's still no way to get hardware video acceleration on Firefox on Linux outside of Wayland. When I'm on Linux I'm also installing Chromium (with the VA-API patches applied) entirely for YouTube as my CPU usage ramps up immensely when watching videos. Watching videos in mpv (or equivalent software) is an alternative, but I like the convenience of watching videos directly through the browser.
Other than that though Firefox has been rock solid for me and has been my daily browser for years now.
I've notice a bit of this on Linux but it never bothered me, however, I feel like it's gotten considerably better lately. For example, I use to have to keep Twitch open in it's own browser instance or else the stream would become very low quality, or even die completely, when I went to another tab. That doesn't seem to be a problem anymore, but I don't know if it's anything FF did.
obviously untrue since you can't be "objectively better" on subjective criteria, of which there are many.
i'll tell you though, the #1 subjective thing i hate is that single-click in the Chrome (Chromium) omnibar doesn't honor OS selection convention. unless you're on windows, where single click selects-all. having this behavior forced on Mac is jarring and awful and no amount of pleading would convince the dictatorial "my way is the right way" attitude of the gatekeepers. they refuse to even have a hidden flag to control this behavior. it's actively hostile.
the incongruity can be seen by clicking in any form field. eg chrome://flags search field. Note that single-click merely places the cursor on mac in a form field. then go to the omnibar. single-click selects-all. ARGH!
I had hoped Edge would fix this, but alas, no. (Also Opera keeps this behavior.)
Fast forward to newer behavior of hiding the protocol from the omnibar, until you click on it. Now when you click (or click-drag, the "proper" way to select less than the entire URL in one stroke, thank you oh overlords), as soon as you release the text changes and your mouse is no longer at the selection point. ARGH!! so awful.
I can't tell you how much I hate this poor implementation choice. However it's not enough to push me to FireFox, which is subjectively very much worse than Chrome.
Firefox containers are amazing! Being able to have a work set of tabs that open all the google services correctly, and a set of personal tabs that open google services correctly is the best thing ever. Not to mention containing all the sites that try to track you into their own little playground.
I am spending more time in FireFox too and want to give it some love. It still has some catching up to do with Chrome. I find myself switching to Chrome for work related activities, namely developer tools, and that's pure habit. I didnt have time to experience the FF version. Is it comparable?? But since my company's only supporting Chrome I'll do development in Chrome. At home I am on FF and have been so far loving it. Some extensions have to do some catching up in FF as well.
When in FireFox I am still experiencing weird bugs but am willing to give her some slack and hope they get fixed. Come on Firefox, FireFix and Rock!
On my xubuntu laptop, I observe the opposite. Firefox leaks memory until I need to restart it, several times a day. However, Chrome reliably releases memory, and I never need to restart it.
On my Arch laptop, it's exactly the opposite - Chrome can become supper sluggish even as I have 16GB of RAM, while Firefox stays snappy.
I assume there are more factors that go into this than just the browser itself. For example, I find Ubuntu to be one of the more sluggish distros out there in general, while Fedora and Arch feel way snappier, but am sure this isn't the case for everyone.
Firefox is at least objectively equal from a perceptive performance perspective. Chrome still has some wins that mostly stem from market share and what benefits come with that (people test in chrome first). I still main FireFox and promote it to anyone that cares to listen but as a web developer even I test in Chrome first because usually that is where most of my audience is.
I use firefox and chrome today, and even after all the perf improvements firefox is still a slower browser. On my 2 core 2014 macbook, only chrome and safari run with enough performance. On my other 4+ core devices it runs fast enough to use as my main browser. On those 4+ core devices, chrome is still more responsive than Firefox :(
Is pinch-to-zoom native on Firefox yet? Last I attempted to switch, you had to install an extension to enable it, and even then it was far "choppier" than Chrome's pinch-to-zoom experience. I've got pretty bad eyesight and zoom consistently so it was a dealbreaker for me.
The only reason I have Chrome installed on any machine is for YouTube. I tend to get weird flickers when in full screen while watching on other browsers, and Chrome is the only one I’m aware of that will allow you to view YouTube content in HDR.
My main motivation is slightly different in that being a software engineer I am actually in a unique position to navigate this tricky path and therefore feel a responsibility to tread the de-googled path, so that it might make it easier for others to follow, should they so wish. At the very least we all need readily available choices.
Interestingly, although I went through all the steps to delete my Google account I got stuck at the point of wondering what to do with my Youtube videos. Although, since last time I checked, it seems now I can actually move them to another Google account, I'll look into that.
The problem with WhatsApp is that the other participants in a given chat are likely to back up the conversation to Google Drive of iCloud which defeats the purpose of E2E encryption. And, of course, the metadata.
> Out of curiosity, what don't you like about the UX?
Not GP, but I’ve railed against Signal’s stability and UX before.
Apart from messages not being delivered sometimes (or taking very long) and getting unnecessary “device changed” messages when nothing has changed (this happened as recent as last year), within a year or two of use, Signal makes sure that the user realizes that it’s meant for ephemeral use.
It does this by a few different ways. One is that if you change devices, you’d have to jump through hoops to rejoin groups you were a part of, and then see that you cannot see the list of members or the group’s name. Once you change devices, at least in iOS, you’d realize that you’ve permanently lost all your previous chats because Signal explicitly prohibits chat backup by iTunes and does not provide a way to backup chats and restore it either.
In terms of UX alone, Telegram > WhatsApp > Signal. FWIW, I use all these and Wire too. Signal gets the least amount of use because the people I chat with on it are also fed up with the poor UX and lack of features.
EDIT: As someone pointed out in a reply, iOS would in fact support this file functionality, so it would presumably be up to Signal to add it.
> at least in iOS, you’d realize that you’ve permanently lost all your previous chats because Signal explicitly prohibits chat backup by iTunes and does not provide a way to backup chats and restore it either.
This seems like an iOS limitation that Signal doesn't want to compromise on. On Android it outputs an encrypted backup file that you can use a file manager to upload or send wherever you want.
No, that’s not true at all. There’s been a Files app in iOS since iOS 11 (which was released in late 2017 and allows you to store the data on device or on the cloud, including creating folders), and before that there was iCloud Drive. Either of these could be used to save the file. The share sheet on iOS also exposes other apps that the user has. So for example, if someone has the Dropbox app, it can be used as a destination to save files.
Thank you for the correction, I will edit my comment. Sorry about that, I haven't owned an iOS device in a few years and clearly didn't search online intelligently enough to find it.
At the time Signal didn't have the swipe-right-to-reply behaviour, nor the ability to lock audio message recording so you can record handsfree. But it has both now!
As far as I know yes Whatsapp uses some of Signal's tech but doesn't implement it in exactly the same way.
They sell ads based on intrests and location. This makes them money. How are you not the product?
They actually can read your data. They abandoned plans to do end to end encryption [0] on icloud backups. When you get a new iphone you can view all your old messages which means Apple in all likelyhood has access to your private key.
You have a valid point on Facebook which may in fact be worse, but Apple's business case is not to hoover up every single piece of information about your life and then sell it to advertisers. They are there to sell hardware and a bit of software. That different motivation leads to different outcomes when a VP asks "should we do this with info we have?"
Having competition is good if only because it keeps companies thinking about the user.
Note I carefully said user not customer. Except for Spotify (and his email host) he is not the customer he is the product they sell. However in all cases he is a user.
I should have explained more here. This was only for family communication. Other communication is split up pretty much depending on where the friend is. Convincing people to up and shift is easier said than done. It could be argued it might be better that way because then my data isn't all with one message service.
For other communications I use Rocket.Chat for team collab, signal, keybase chat or sms(which if they do happen to have iMessage does convert). I definitely do not trust facebook any more than Google. And I would agree thats a sideways move not an improvement
- If you're going to "autonomy, independance and self-hosting", it's a step sideways for sure
- If you're going to "stop giving all my information to a central entity" it's definitely a step forward. Giving a part to Google, a part to Facebook and a part to Apple is better than giving everything to one of them, whichever they are.
Even if this is true, there's a significant difference in that Google would lose nearly every single one of GCP's customers if it was ever proven they were mining data of their customers' cloud services.
And at the very least, it is much harder for Google to correlate a competitors' account systems and user data with their own profiles they use for ad targeting.
And of course, most importantly: Apple collects a lot less data when you use their apps. For instance, Maps data is never associated with an Apple ID, and significant work is done to fuzz and scramble the anonymous data they store to avoid it being possible to turn it into data about a real person. In comparison, Google Maps logs your location to your Google account every five minutes.
I never read Google discriminates between paying customers before. That's such a wild accusation that it requires serious evidence.
Edit: I can reply anymore but just supply a link of data handling discrimination between paying customers because that's what you imply by "there is not difference between GSuite customers and normal gmail".
You're correct in that Google doesn't discriminate between paying and non-paying customers: It happily abuses the privacy of it's paying customers too.
Many of Google's uses of data are not specific to whether or not someone is using G Suite or consumer Gmail as far as I am aware.
Bit of advice: If you don't know something, remain silent or say you don't know or ask a question. Don't confidently assert something you just made up.
I can say one of the ones that horrified me the most shortly after I transitioned off of Gmail was Smart Reply. To my knowledge, nobody was able to confirm at the time that even paid G Suite accounts were immune to being used as training data. (If you have insight on this, let me know!)
I definitely don't want my email used to train Google's AI models, which might unpredictably cough up sensitive data since machine learning is pretty much a black box.
A big issue is that at any time, Google may introduce a new "feature" and decide to use your data to power it. I also think of how purchase data gets extracted from your receipts to store in your Google account profile and the like (https://myaccount.google.com/purchases although the text on this page has changed... did they stop?) and I feel a privacy-first service would need to at minimum have switches to control what kind of data processing is performed on their email, and default new features to be off.
I do know the answer. It's probably in the privacy policy for gsuite somewhere, but that's a long document. I'm unsure if I can share it though.
What sensitive information are you concerned about coughing up? While I haven't actually looked closely at how smart reply works, it isn't just a simple lstm on text, it tracks contextual info like recipient names, so "hey " on the first line will autocomple to "Hey Todd and Amanda" if you're sending am email to two people named Todd and Amanda.
So there's some tokenization and preprocessing happening, which would avoid most of the potential privacy issues I can think up with something like that (which are all of the form of automoplete linking your name to a private fact).
Not really. It's informative of the policies on sharing confidential information, yes.
But it has nothing to do with what the actual policy on customer data is. My guess is that you'd be pleasantly surprised be the policy. I just can't find it documented publicly anywhere, so I don't know that I can share the actual policies. There are people who's job it is to share such things, they're like account managers and support people and they have guidance on the way the things they can say. My guidance is more like "don't unless it's clearly public".
Put another way, the training on data handling is longer than the training on corporate communication. So if I'm this careful with my communication, imagine the ridiculous lengths I go to with user data safety.
*Search(1) -> DuckDuckGo
*Gmail(2) -> Fastmail
*Android -> SailfishOS (https://sailfishos.org/)
*Maps -> OpenStreetMaps
*Youtube(3) -> Youtube-dl, "subscriptions" with rss-feeds
*Drive -> Self-hosted Nextloud & Syncthing
*Calendar -> At first Fastmail, but nowadays back to paper calendar
*Chrome -> Brave & Firefox
(1) When having problems finding I sometimes check Google Search with bangs.
(2) Accounts still exist and forward to fastmail as I'm slowly changing my subscriptions etc.
(3) Youtube I feel is the toughest to get rid of, but nowadays I hardly ever go on the website as I hate all the clickbait that the algorithm tries to stuff into my face.
Concerning Youtube, you may be interested in https://www.invidio.us/ which is an alternative front end. There are also extensions for Firefox which will automatically redirect any Youtube links you happen to come across to open on Invidious.
I tried to do simplest thing: create playlist - the only thing I'm really missing not having YT account (beside commenting).
1. First of all, it forced me to create Invidio.us account. Why it can't store everything in my cookie?
2. Next, I searched for a video typing its YT code "fVCAFvIq_F8" - no results. After several attempts I figured out that sometimes it does find it and sometimes it doesn't. Weird.
3. Alright, I copied full address of a video into search box, clicked on result - and got an error: "The uploader has not made this video available in your country." Umm... What? I have no problem watching it on YT itself, why would Invidio restrict me? But even if it was country-restricted, why would Invidio reproduce this stupid Google-imposed geographical restrictions/discrimination?
3. Very irritated, I went for another video (OlNC6gK2y0I) - only to get another error: "The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported" ...
4. It was getting boring, but for the sake of experiment I went for yet another video - Invidio found it and played, but... there is no "Add to a play list" button? Turned out, first you need go to a settings, scroll down, find and click "View all playlists" link, on the next page click "Create playlist" link, on the next page create it, then go back to a video you wanted to add and add it. Thats... a clusterfuck.
5. Alright I go to a front page - where can I see my playlist? Nowhere. You need to find and turn on separate setting just to get "Playlists" link on the front page. (Isn't it obvious that I need playlists from the very fact that I created it?)
OK, maybe at least Invidio has additional functionality compared to YT, like downloading video? No, "Download is disabled." Why?
To all of that I must add that Invidio.us worked very slow, sluggish and unresponsive. Occasionally I was getting "Rate limit exceeded" error just trying to open front page.
I ran into invidio.us as I started using straw-viewer[0] instead of youtube-viewer, and it uses individio.us api key. Didn't know that they had extensions to browsers though!
I use the free Freetube application, which uses invidious behind the scenes. Invidious does throw errors sometimes because it gets blocked (or rate limited) by YouTube.
I agree with your point about YouTube. I'll try out the combo you have.
I like YouTube for the videos on there and nothing else. I hate all the ads and how if you watch one video that is off topic from what you usually watch then the algorithm gets messed up and your recommended videos become way different.
Yea, Fastmail rocks! Only problem is that people don't know what it is and and as I don't live in english-speaking country I often have to spell it out.
I should buy "fastmile.com" and use that as an email alias - would solve a lot of problems, lol.
Can you elaborate on the Nextcloud&Syncthing part?
It would be awesome to have LAN local syncing (as Syntching does), while being able to share doc to the outside world (NextCloud's functionality).
Did you figure this out?
Anther topic: yeah, youtube is not something you can replace, but you can still use other frontends, thus the rabbithole recommendation engine doesn't affect you, nor the advertisements. On Android, NewPipe is a great client.
Apologizes from late reply. I have Raspberry Pi running Syncthing on LAN. I share my music, youtube-dl'd videos, podcasts etc. with my phone and laptops through it. Also sometimes I use it to share other documents, code etc. Works also as nice backup as the PI runs rsync with cron to store Syncthing contents to other HDD also.
Nextcloud runs on Digital Ocean droplet and I upload my photos there from phone, store contacts and share larger files with people. Currently Syncthing and Nextcloud do not communicate in anyway.
And yeah, youtube-dl has been lifesaver to escape that "rabbithole recommendation engine" as you awesomely put :D
I use a rpi4 running raspbian and resillio sync (https://www.resilio.com/) for my internal photo backups and data syncing. It also shares outside my local network well but the users need the software installed.
My list is: DuckDuckGo, Protonmail (tutanota also an option but want to self-host eventually, rather than switch to another provider), LineageOS (want to get to Linux phone asap, preferably NixOS), OSM, Youtube-dl and container tabs in ff, git, org-mode, qutebrowser and firefox.
Sounds good! What has been your experience with protonmail?
I have been looking into NixOS also, but not for phone - are there any ongoing projects?
Org-mode is also something I maybe one day learn to use especially if I make the jump into emacs!
I don't have anything against fastmail's calendar but I personally also regressed to a paper planner. I just find that I am more engaged with my planning this way, while the digital calendar sorta does its own thing and spits notifications at me for stuff I've forgotten about.
I still use digital for work since it's collaborative but my personal stuff is all inscribed on a dead tree, now.
I really tried giving DDG a chance but I always found myself having to go back to Google to find the right information. This would especially pertain to technical matters. The 'average-joe-browsing' (e.g. amazon, movies, songs etc.) worked fine, but when it came down to research papers or solving software problems, I was too often left disappointed.
A couple of weeks back I switched to Qwant[1]. Privacy focused, technical-matters-friendly, and most importantly, haven't had to look at Google once. Really enjoying it so far.
You could add !s before your search query to get Startpage results(google results without tracking) for that query. See the complete list of bangs here: https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html
You can put the bang commands anywhere in the query — in the beginning, in the end and anywhere in the middle. Startpage (!s) is another option to get results from Google without directly connecting to Google.
Am I missing something with that flag? when I do that it just redirects to the google scholar results. I'm therefore nto sure the gain of going to duckduckgo.com and having to type !scholar before every query instead of just scholar.google.com
I have mostly de-googled myself. For search I mainly rely on DuckDuckGo, but as many people have pointed out sometimes DuckDuckGo doesn't cut it. When that happens I either use Google or Startpage.
I usually use Google when I want information about a business near me. I haven't tested this thoroughly but I think Google does a better job of getting and presenting phone numbers, accurate store hours, etc.
For email I'm a big fan of Fastmail. The service is great and the web UI is fast and easy to use. For storage I also rely on Fastmail - their standard plan comes with 30 GB of storage. They also provide calendars, notes, and contacts.
My personal phone is an iPhone. I didn't intentionally switch a while back - my android phone broke and my family had an iPhone I could use. I've stuck with it since then, I like the overall experience. I don't currently use any of the Apple Cloud services. It's been rough connecting my phone to my Linux laptop, but I've found the best way to handle it is to just have a Windows VM for uploading music to and downloading photos from my iPhone. I know there's https://www.libimobiledevice.org/ but it looks like it only works for images.
For music I either use Spotify, Bandcamp, or ripping CDs. I never tried out Google Music.
The one thing I haven't found a good replacement for has been YouTube. I'm definitely going to check out some of the suggestions people have made in this thread regarding that.
I have a quick suggestion for you, re: using Linux: rely on web apps. iCloud.com works fine on my Linux laptop using FireFox. Same with a Microsoft Office 365 (web apps, not native apps). I am a million miles away from being a security expert, but in my non-expert opinion, I feel safer using web apps than native apps, especially on my iPhone. I hate installing apps, and always resent prompts like “install our f@cking app...”
My biggest gripe with DDG is that if I search for a business, even when using the exact name, it will almost surely come back with a couple Yelp results (which is like getting a link to a 2005 MySpace page) followed by a dozen Facebook profiles that vaguely resemble the name of the business I was searching for.
This being said DDG was able to take over 99.99% of my searching needs for some time now. And when I have some query that doesn't seem to return anything useful on DDG it turns out Google doesn't really do much better (YMMV).
I still use Youtube and Google Maps heavily compared to alternative services. But for everything else I decided to "spread the joy" and not rely on a single provider of services.
> My biggest gripe with DDG is that if I search for a business, even when using the exact name, it will almost surely come back with a couple Yelp results (which is like getting a link to a 2005 MySpace page) followed by a dozen Facebook profiles that vaguely resemble the name of the business I was searching for.
I've had this same experience. Looking up businesses is pretty much the only time I use Google.
I’ve been positively suprised many times, guessing for these bangs as well, very often they tend to be exactly as one would expect, even for sites in my own native language: norwegian, there are bangs for the more niche sites as well.
When I want to look something up in the norwegian Wikipedia I do !wno, for english just !w or !wen (and if I for some reason unbeknownst would want search in another language, it would be just a language tag away), I was very happy to see bangs for both the online norwegian dictionaries I use (!naob and !norsk), and some of the nicher sites, though, maybe not quite so niche here in HN: !dfw (Dwarf Fortress Wiki), even !nhw (nethack), etc.
If you're looking for offsite backup (which seems to be the main use case of your use of Google Photos and now iCloud) then Backblaze if you're on Mac or Windows, or Backblaze B2 if you're on Linux is very affordable.
I'm using Backblaze to hold my backups for both my home server and my production server. For almost half a terabyte of data I'm currently paying $1.89 per month for around 300 GB, which is down from the $2.04 I was paying when it was around 400 (fixed an exclusion directive in my backup script to store less files). It is absolutely worth that trivial price to know everything digital I give a crap about has an automated offsite and encrypted backup in addition to my other backups.
I'm using the B2 storage (https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage.html) since I'm backing up multiple machines and arbitrary sets of files, and it works on a pay-for-what-you-use basis. You can get more storage (they say unlimited, and I couldn't find anything in their literature to contradict that assertion) in the basic backup plans, but you don't get as much choice: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html
The trouble with de-Google is you have to replace a highly integrated suite of apps with separate bits which lack integration.
Also, if you have hundreds of accounts where you used gmail to register and hundreds or thousands of contacts which might send you mail, it's hard to switch.
I switched away from Gmail after using it as a main email for more than a decade. I just went through all my accounts in my password manager and changed it. It doesn't have to get done quickly, little by little does it.
Also, you don't have to delete your Gmail account completely. Mine sits there mostly unused just in case, it's fine.
I didn't kill off my gmail accounts, but they all forward to my ProtonMail accounts for those contacts that haven't been updated to my ProtonMail accounts yet. Those get handled piecemeal, which is pretty easy.
Yeah fully realize the move to ios and using iCloud could be another form of lock-in. But other than now not having Google apps all the other apps are the same. I’ve picked up my old Android a few days back and nothing would prevent me from easily switching back.
I don’t feel locked in at all.
If I went feet first in iEcosystem then for sure would be different story
You can use an Apple phone without using a lot of Apple services and contributing a lot to a cloud profile of you. Given how many apps on the Android ecosystem depend on Play Services to function, it's nearly impossible to do this with Android.
I have a Brave Heart Edition PinePhone, and I'm hoping to switch to a real Linux phone soon, but for now, carrying an iPhone as a pretty basic phone is still a big privacy improvement.
I'm planning to get a PinePhone to play with. I think has a ways to come. But i'm really excited that an affordable phone like this can land in the hands of more developers to work on mobile OS's.
Yeah, it's really neat. I got the iPhone 11 because I need something reliable for now for work purposes, but my hope is to switch to my PinePhone when I feel it is ready.
MicroG still sends all of your data to Google! The only thing MicroG is doing is making the Google API client code on your phone open source. But it's not really protecting you from sending your data to Google.
Although I agree with the actions this person has taken, and I agree that privacy is an excellent reason, his webpage describing adwords and adsense was not that scary at face value.
I think it is much more scary if you realize that google works very hard to identify who you are accurately, and even matches it with things like offline purchase data.
The opposite of privacy is identification, and google is arguably the most capable and well-funded identification service on the planet.
I also think we as tech people should set a good example.
We could map the path for the less technically adept folks around us to take steps in the right direction.
We could provide support instead of ridicule when people make inconvenient choices instead of giving in.
And we could BE people who care about privacy, even if it is just to read the privacy policy, or block some trackers.
Hmmm... I did give in :) Google locked my account and I was like "okay.jpg", no google for me anymore. Uneventful story, not even enough for a blog post.
Yeah, moving from Google over to Apple is just cheating. It's better for privacy, but I'd rather thinker with my system to remove the spyware than remove the spyware and largely give up the ability to easily tinker with my system.
I don’t know. I’m a tinkerer but if we think about phone ecosystem, then I just want my phone to work and not spy on me. I’ll tinker with my other devices, but after bricking one phone, I won’t do it again.
The tinkering doesn't have to be invasive or risky. I share your worry and am rather scared of breaking anything because of the amount of work I put into the configuration. My solution is to root very early on, just after testing everything and making sure I don't want to make sure of my 14 day return right, so if something goes wrong there I don't lose data. After that, I use root for all sorts of things, but after configuring everything I don't do invasive things like installing different ROMs or removing system apps or so.
Indeed. The other thing I learned after having a Windows Mobile phone for years: I don't need every latest app either. I want my phone to take calls, texts, emails, pictures, and I am mostly good to go.
I switched to an iPhone recently, but I'm not really engaging heavily with Apple's services or ecosystem.
The ability to tinker was my argument for Android for years. And if I want to tinker Android is still the way.
After a point of tinkering, flashing Roms, getting stuck in hairy situations where your phone is bootlooping and you don't know if you will get it back.
At some point having to mess with configuration gets annoying.
I kinda view this like an experiment to see how the other side is living with my eye very much on Android waiting for an excuse to jump back over.
I wish there were more good options for De-Google'd Android shipped from a vendor that actually cared about privacy and had the chops to make a smooth experience
I still don't understand why people are moving from G products and use Apple+self-hosted? The author is saying he is hosting the e-mail server but, for example, not an iCal server.
Google has no problem browsing through your data to serve you "better" advertisement, while Apple claims to respect your privacy (I would be tempted to believe them).
I wonder what people have to think about Outlook (M365) for many of these things (email, calendar, storage, photos)? Assuming people are fine with paid subscriptions. The author himself is using paid services from apple.
Huh? LineageOS has been rock stable for me for years as long as I go with stable builds. Maybe the author meant using something like microG to replace all the google frameworks?
For some phones, proper hardware support is iffy at best, and things constantly crash at worst. The stability of LineageOS seems to correlate roughly with how popular that phone is with LineageOS devs, so if you have a phone with only one maintainer, chances are that some things might not work super well. (It also depends on how committed to open source the manufacturer is, but these days, the answer is "not at all" for the vast majority, so it doesn't really matter.)
Source: I've been using Cyanogen/LineageOS for years on various phones, and even tried getting it working on an officially unsupported phone (without luck).
Yes this! I probably picked some bad phones to give this a go. I had a Samsung Captiva for a while and I flashed hundreds of times on that. Lots of different roms and it took a while for the Cyanogen Rom become stable.
Then the whole Drama with Cyanogen the company also was weird.. kept me from messing with cyanogen specifically for a while.
Over all felt like playing the lottery. I'd do tons and tons of reading through xda forums and had to do things exactly right if misunderstood even a single step some of these phones were bricked.
Kinda like anything at some point you just need a break and it just needs to work :)
Yes, and I believe OnePlus is one of the few manufacturers that is fairly welcoming to open source and third-party ROMs (which makes sense since their original phone was based on Cyanogenmod). My current phone, the Sony Xperia XA2, is similarly very stable, even with microG, because Sony provides open device configurations for most (all?) of their phones. But almost all of my past phones (mostly Motorola and HTC) have had various stability issues that didn't exist on the built-in ROMs. It's still worth it for me, but I would definitely not recommend it to anyone that isn't willing to roll the dice and potentially put up with some pain.
+1 for Deepl. Google Translate's quality is very close to Deepl and for a long time I couldn't tell which is better, but I recently discovered that Deepl does German brainfuck sentences correctly and Google and Microsoft Translate both mess it up. (In German you can say "the ball has the dog" and by conjugating "the" correctly ("der ball" and "den hund", iirc, or the other way around, I can never remember) it can mean "the dog has the ball" despite being in the wrong order.)
Aside from self-hosted email, my list is very similar to yours, I just wanted to highlight Deepl because few people seem to know it and it's a German company so I trust that a whole lot more from the outset.
I'm surprised by not seeing more comments against the OP moving from Google to move almost everything to Apple & Facebook.
I've also started a similar process but haven't managed to ditch Google completely yet, mainly for convenience.
Because my concern was mainly privacy, I started by adding a pi-hole in the home network and that allowed me to block an infinite number of tracking codes and ads. This improved the overall internet experience for everyone. I've also attached a HDD to the raspberry pi and created a network drive. With the help of a good script the backups are automatic and silent.
For messaging, Telegram FTW, but can't seem to convince a lot of my friends to move over.
Telegram changed in the last couple of years. You can choose between secret chats (e2e encrypted) and normal which are just user-server storage-user encrypted. End-to-end voice calls is also a feature.
If you ask me between the Google / Facebook messaging apps (Whatsapp, Messenger, etc) and Telegram, today I'd say Telegram has an advantage because it has a good UI, works across devices and the desktop client works like a charm. For someone that wants to ditch the Google / Facebook environment and be sure their grandmother can use it, I don't see much better options.
It's not as faulty as it used to be, but I see the old times made a reputation for it.
> You can choose between secret chats (e2e encrypted) and normal which are just user-server storage-user encrypted.
I am aware of that, though I think in the second case it's better to pretend messages are not encrypted at all on the server side since mere storage encryption can be circumvented all too easily.
Anyway, having the choice between encryption and no encryption is exactly the problem. How many Telegram users choose e2e-encrypted chats? AFAIK you have to enable this for every conversation separately, right?
It's their approach and I'm personally ok with it. Due to my friends I use FB messenger a lot and they say it will take years to be e2e encrypted, so I believe it's a fair compromise from Telegram.
I wonder the same. The reason I use Telegram is because it's the only thing I can convince a significant enough number of friends and family to move over to because of the superior user experience and non-Facebook, not because it's the most privacy-friendly solution out there. If I could choose a platform, it would probably be Wire, but the UX is pretty bad and I don't see my mom using that.
I thought Wire seems to suffer from the “Electron curse” (of being sluggish) on desktop. Then I realized that the app is slow on all platforms, including mobile. Any chat that has more than a few images brings the client to a crawl when scrolling. The company behind Wire also focuses on paying users (the solution targeted for teams and companies). So getting support is close to futile.
The business support is also not what one might hope for. The couple Euros we pay per month per user is not enough to get a few minutes of a developer's time so it's very similar to not having any support.
Of course the best choice for maximum flexibility is to have your own domain, then you can always move if you want. We want to keep you by being the best, not due to lock-in!
Yep, I use myname@mysurname.com as my email... It costs 10 dollars a year to keep my own domain, and that lets me not only have my own website on my own domain, and my own email address that will never have to change, but also for my whole family! Really good "investment".
Try looking at a VoIP service like voip.ms for parking and forwarding numbers. I think I pay less than a dollar a month to maintain and forward each one of my phone numbers. Flowroute is another provider to look at as well. I’ve used both for years and don’t have much to complain about.
A lot of people praise DDG and I'm also one using it as a default search engine, but it's not exactly clear how much independent it is. I've started to consider using Cliqz (https://cliqz.com/) as an alternative or at least a parallel experiment; they claim to be totally independent and to care for user privacy at least as much as DDG does.
Does any other HNer have experience with their search result ? I'm still not using it enough to have a reliable conclusion of my own.
I've been using DDG pretty exclusively for over a year, and I have no complaints. It also handles pretty tough searches reasonably well. Maybe I'm not a power user or whatever, but DDG works so well for me I'm not even enticed by Google's search (especially w/ the redesigns). I think of it less as a "real" search engine and more of a data gathering trap--meaning that aspect of it is more significant than its search result quality.
I'd recommend trying these Google Alt's: Protonmail or Fairmail for email. DuckduckGo or Bromite for low-ad/tracker browsing, or button down your Chrome with Umatrix/UBO and a host of other extensions (Privacy Badger, Canvas Blocker, etc.) Been using Protonmail beta's Calender feature with success, can't wait for their Android App. Have begun pulling all my photos off Photos and moving to both local drives and PCloud, and considering encrypting them at rest there too. DDG/SearX for Search. NextDNS for secure and adfree DNS mimicing PiHole (which I have at home) when away. If you want to keep your awesome Android hardware (OnePlus6T here), you can disable Google Services Framework and neuter everything at will using NetGuard, with the paid version allowing individual link granularity, so you can stop that Facebook link Spotify spawns upon launch, among all others. This allows you to fine tune each app to comm with only links you allow. FB is particularly pesky..once it fails to connect to it's obvious servers, it spawns other numerical IP's that you have to do lookups on to see where/who they are...often returning to FB, so it's an ongoing task, recommended only for those most commited. I was on this path well before Shoshana's book, but her presentation was reaffirming.
EDIT: of course...Signal, how did I forget that..most used app of all.
DuckduckGo or Bromite for low-ad/tracker browsing, or button down your Chrome with Umatrix/UBO and a host of other extensions (Privacy Badger, Canvas Blocker, etc.)
Been using Protonmail beta's Calender feature with success, can't wait for their Android App.
Have begun pulling all my photos off Photos and moving to both local drives and PCloud, and considering encrypting them at rest there too.
DDG/SearX for Search.
NextDNS for secure and adfree DNS mimicing PiHole (which I have at home) when away.
If you want to keep your awesome Android hardware (OnePlus6T here), you can disable Google Services Framework and neuter everything at will using NetGuard, with the paid version allowing individual link granularity, so you can stop that Facebook link Spotify spawns upon launch, among all others.
This allows you to fine tune each app to comm with only links you allow. FB is particularly pesky..once it fails to connect to it's obvious servers, it spawns other numerical IP's that you have to do lookups on to see where/who they are...often returning to FB, so it's an ongoing task, recommended only for those most commited. I was on this path well before Shoshana's book, but her presentation was reaffirming.
EDIT: of course...Signal, how did I forget that..most used app of all.
I've done a similar thing, qwant, protonmail, firefox (4 different profiles and scores of containers), privacy badger, ublock origin, decentral eyes, but I'm convinced it's not possible to stop tracking. My browser finger print is unique and it doesn't seem possible to change that.
Also I have an android phone with google apps, facebook, twitter, scores of other apps tracking me. There's not much I can do about giving google my location data atm. I like waze and fitness apps too much.
If you're using firefox, you're already in a bucket of only 4.42% [0]. But even without that, just take your screen resolution, browser + os version, font list, your time zone, and you're almost already unique.
having my timezone set to utc was probably the most annoying thing about the firefox anti fingerprint setting. I never got quick and efficient at doing quick math to know what the local time was in my head.
yeah, I can't recall every factor but my locale was the biggest one and setting it to US is annoying for spelling reasons. colour vs color, etc.
resolution as mentioned is another big factor but that was also annoy having the default resolution. Maybe I would have gotten used to it, but I tried for many weeks with the firefox anti fingerprint setting but eventually gave up, it was too inconvenient.
Oddly one of the few things I actually kept is Google search itself after noticed that I basically add !g to every DDG search, and I've tried to firewall it off as much as I can.
Having used DDG for several years now as the default on all my devices, i can say that since December the results are completely useless. Not sure what happened.
I had never to use "!g" before. Now it is required for 1/3 of my regular searches, and "!ig" for 100% of the image "!i" searches.
I replaced 90% of my images searches with Bing Images. I like the UI better and the results are almost as good. Since I use DDG for ~80% of regular searches and Google for the remainder, not giving one party all information seems like it should somewhat level the playing field.
Also, I was going to type that a small percentage of my image searches still go to Google for their license selection feature, but I figured I should double check, and whaddayaknow? Bing can do license filtering too. Not sure how good it'll be, but I'll definitely be trying this.
Note that instead of typing !something (which I find quite annoying), you can just bind your browser to a keyword. I type "bi test" in my address bar for Bing Images "test" search, instead of having to type a bang and some by-ddg-defined shortcut and giving DDG the data (not that I distrust them, but need-to-know...). Wiki searching is also super convenient like this: wi for wikipedia, dwi for deutsch wikipedia, owi for openstreetmap wiki, etc. Right click in the search field and choose 'Add keyword for this search' usually does the trick.
That's an angle I hadn't thought of, that it might contribute to DDG's attack on Google by supplying them more data, particularly the queries one goes to Google for. Good point.
Amazingly how similar my path is to Aaron’s. I use paid for Google services (GCP, buy lots of movies and books) but I have mostly moved to DDG, combination of FastMail and ProtonMail, (sort of) trust Apple walled garden, and rely heavily on FireFox containers to separate data for all web properties that I visit and use.
I do still use Google Photos and Microsoft OneDrive for secondary backups for my photos on iCloud (my iPhone auto exports to all three when I am on WiFi) and I sometimes use Google Search in a FireFox container (I use one container for all Google web properties).
Respect to Aaron for running his own email service. I think about doing that but never do. My problem is that I enjoy spending time writing, and designing and writing code, and I don’t make time for some things that I would like to try. Time management is a pain sometimes.
EDIT: something I forgot to add: when following a web link, copy the URI and then open the appropriate FireFox container for the domain and copy the URI to a new tab in the correct container. Good hygiene.
After seeing similar threads on HN, I’ve also started a similar journey. I managed to migrate to Firefox with DuckDuckGo as the default search engine. But I’ve also added a shortcut for Google search: if I feel like I am missing something I open a new tab and type “go [keywords]”.
You can actually use !g anywhere in the search strings. It's useful when you finish typing your query, you can change your search engine at the last second.
This never made sense to me, if you're concerned about privacy, why send your search queries to an intermediary when the browser is perfectly capable of handling that for you.
I understand the reasoning and I applaud the effort. As the author correctly identified he loses people by switching from Google to Apple, since ,when it comes to cell phones, it seems like choosing a lesser evil at best.
I’ve been using DuckDuckGo since it launched. But are we down to two search engine choices now? Google or DDG? What other alternatives are there?
De-Googling services is quite easy for the most part as there are many competing alternatives including good self-hosted options.
As a web user, I block all Google JavaScript that gets embedded in 99% of sites using a combination uBlock, NoScript, and my own DNS. Most sites load fine but some that use the Google API fail to show anything—which is silly when most of them are plain text and image articles.
Fastmail is really nice alternative, not just for the email but because it comes with a calendar and contacts.
You can sync contacts via CardDav and your calendar via CalDav.
Even better, if you have a work Google account like I do, you can import your calendar as an overlay on Fastmail's calendar using OAuth2.
If you'd like your calendar without the pesky forced management profiles, it's a neat workaround while still remaining relatively secure. It also doesn't break when your arbitrary forced password rotation kicks in every 90 days ;)
At least it’s in line with their reasoning: https://geekgonecrazy.com/2020/04/27/de-googling/. But yes, the threat of lock-in/deplatforming/being at the mercy of a massive corporation is still present.
Yes, there are just two generally usable mobile OSs - ios and android. The only way to not share you every living moment with google while still having a snartphone is to have an iphone.
It's fucked up that's the way world is, but it is the way the world is.
There is a better way: Google-free Android. You get to use/keep one of the many supported Android devices without giving either Google or Apple insight in whatever you happen to be doing .I've been doing this for more or less as long as I've used Android, i.e. close to 10 years now. Back then LineageOS was still called Cyanogenmod. There were - and still are - alternative AOSP-based distributions which do more or less the same thing. These are Google-free by default, is you so choose you can either add the Google bits ('gapps' - a package containing the Google services framework and Google apps) or a free-software alternative which tries to emulate GSF, or none of the above. Nae lairds, nae kings -> nae Apple, nae Google (to paraphrase Pratchett)
That's what I meant by "generally" usable. You can install Lineage. I can as sell. But most people can't.
But the worst thing is that to get most use of Android, you have to have Play store and attached surveillance services. There's a lot of cool stuff on fdroid, but your city's public transport? Your bank's app? Your local taxi's app? Your city's meal delivery app? You're not getting that without Google Play.
You can get some stuff from sites like apkmirror, but that's at the risk of getting malware (again, the two of us can see what's malware and what's the actual apk, but most can't) and at the cost of automated security updates.
I lived like that for a while, and it's not worth it. Maybe if you don't mind you're smartphone is actually a dumbphone - which is a good thing for some people who want it that way because of minimalism and somesuch, but most people don't.
I've been slowly de-googling/de-large-corporationing.
- DuckDuckGo for search mostly, trying out qwant
- Runbox for email, I like the service and its incredibly cheap and have my own domain
- Youtube -> miniflux for subscriptions & newpipe on my phone
- I cant delete facebook but I've mitigated it to using matrix + a facebook->matrix bridge
- Using osmand~ and open street maps for directions, i dont have a way to get public transport directions, I helped write a program that does this in college but,, its not very good
And people ask why I have su on my phone. I want ownership, nothing more...
Anyway, for public transport directions, have you checked the apps available in F-Droid? The main ones that come to mind are Transportr and Öffi, I don't know if they work (well) whereever you're located though. Newer versions of OsmAnd can also do this to an extent, but doesn't pull the schedules (let alone realtime delays) so it only shows you "you can take bus 6 and then train 9" without knowing anything about their schedules, so that's largely useless at the moment.
I'm actually in the slow process of this as well. Moving to DDG is the easiest starting point; in the beginning it's tempting to type g! with every search until you start trusting the results. Next I changed from my Pixel 2 to a SailfishX on a Sony phone. I'm planning on moving to Owncloud for contacts/storage/docs next. It's surprising how I've paid for Google to deeply invade my life.
I bought an used Xperia and installed Sailfish on it. LOVE IT! The gestures feel so natural way to use phone, ambients make it look badass and the program management is really creative.
Android app support is what allowed me to transition because of banking apps etc. It's not 100% polished (especially the Android app usage) but at its worst works well enough and at it's best, the experience IMO tops any other phone OS that i've used.
Agreed, if I could have Sailfish on a Huawei P40 I'd be ecstatic. As it stands using Here maps, built in browser, and basic phone tools get me 90% of the way. I'm cheating a little in my transition -- I've moved my must use apps over to my iPad pro. 2FA, Instagram (a drug habit I hope to kick later in the summer), Keybase, mobile check deposit, etc.
I need to find a replacement for Google Keep (love how easy it is to move text/urls/photos between devices, jot down ideas / record thoughts) and Hangouts Dialer still.
For files/photos I recommend self-hosting NextCloud. The new version of SailfishOS containts native Nextcloud services(!!!).
For 2FA you can install Android app Authy. Foil Auth is a native one, but haven't tested it though.
Feel you on Instagram habit. I de-social-mediaized (?) in late 2019 and haven't looked back, but it was tough!
Takeout doesn't work in practice for bigger collections (archive creation routinely fails, timeouts while downloading, 50GB max size results in many splits)
Thanks! Quick question, does gphotos-sync download the images in the original resolution? One of the limitations of tools like this in the past is that they could only download the "high resolution" (compressed) images.
- I had to manually create several large albums by year, and then created a takeout archive with just that album. Then created another archive with the next album, ... You may not need to do this, try the whole enchilada first. My wife's photo takeout didn't require this, for example.
- I had to pick smaller archive sizes. 8gb worked for me. Yes, it was a lot of chunks.
- I had to switch to Chrome (not Firefox, which is my daily driver) before the download would complete successfully.
- Downloading to my NAS directly made it fail. Had to use local disk.
- wired, not wifi
Even with all these in place, my ISP sometimes didn't allow downloads to finish successfully. I had to run them early in the morning over several days.
I had to go through and redo several chunks that corrupted themselves somehow. Verify the chunks with `gunzip -t`
Also: now that you've got your photos and videos back, you might be interested in PhotoStructure! Details are in my profile. I'm providing free access to the beta in exchange for feedback.
That is scary, I migrated off of Google Photos before the integration with Google Drive was removed, but I was only ever comfortable using it knowing that as I snap photos they were being downloaded to a hard drive at my house.
I switched over to OneDrive and thankfully it still works that way.
I have Fastmail and other private email services but I've been unable to really move over because of all the integrations that Gmail has. Automatic email scanning for trip details, calendar integrations, searches from the web also surfacing details from emails, google voice, tons of other apps and extensions.
It would be a nice if there was a way to get all this functionality beyond Gmail.
I use a private Searx instance which includes searches over my own document archive in its results. To achieve this I made a new Searx 'engine' [1] - which is essentially a proxy between the Searx instance and another search engine - which connects Searx to a Recoll instance. Since Recoll can also search email it would be fairly trivial to include results from there as well although I have never used this. The 'engine' would need to be extended in such as way as to communicate the (logged-in) username to Recoll so it returns results from the correct email account (or no email account for anonymous users) but that is a fairly trivial change.
Protonmail is my primary email, I had initially planned to eventually shut down my gmail account after a 2 year grace period but have left it open for various google integrations I still need. It's useful for siging up to things I don't want to give my actual email to as well.
The author mentions it twice: under Contacts/Calendar "I’m thinking about using nextcloud." and under Docs "Nextcloud might fill this gap. But I don’t feel a void to fill right now."
Since this place, at this time, seems to be as good as any to ask for recommendations:
Is there a paid service that's similar to Google Voice where I can get an extra phone number and have calls to it routed to my normal phone? I'd like to have a phone number that's "out there", so to speak, but not my real number.
After having n photo startups (paid and free) disappear into the mist, along with my photos and videos, I decided self-hosting was the only thing I could trust. I couldn't find any software that would reliably scale to my library and fix my mess of duplicates and bitrot files, so I made it. I'm providing access to the beta for free in exchange for feedback, if you'd like to try it. https://photostructure.com/about/v-0-8/ is dropping this week.
I'm a bit wary of services with recurrent costs that offer a lifetime pass. But I guess even if they fold in 5 years you're getting your money's worth anyway.
Pcloud also makes you pay separately (and quite a lot) for having encryption turned on.
Have been considering encrypting locally (which pCloud already does, but at the cost) using File Guard extension on Chrome, and Cryptomator on Android. All encryption passwords to be stored in BitWarden.
Signal does not play nice with other protocols and centralizes everything. Hardly an improvement. Better go for real alternatives that will likely survive way longer like Riot/Matrix.
Or 'plain and simple' XMPP with OMEMO [1] encryption. This is easy to host yourself using Prosody or Ejabberd or another XMPP server, Conversations (or one of its forks) on Android, Monal or Siskin or iOS, something like converse.js in a browser, etc.
So far I haven’t seen any limitations by providers. I can see potentially rate limiting. But I’ve done this before even helping move client emails via outlook to another provider. The client just happily syncs any email you toss in
Yep, IMAP is a pretty stupid organizer. Some servers also support a feature: when you upload a message into outbox folder, the server picks it up and sends to the specified recipients.
Yes, they do allow it. That's normally how you migrate mailboxes as an individual. Most providers have storage limits so it's not really subject to abuse.
If everyone did this, google wouldn't exist, a lot of the open source google software wouldn't exist. Isn't the main point of de-googling, is that everyone does it. Because you can be influenced indirectly even if you do de-google, and that the benefits of de-googling should emerge with popularity. I'm sure some people are de-googling because of personal privacy, but most people aren't targets so this doesn't matter. One of the benefits I can see is that it reduces the quality to the users, and the value to the large companies. That way, data/ power is not consolidated, and we have privacy by segregation.
In summary, I don't see the purpose of de-googling as an individual. And if de-google collectively, we're all worse off. And yet I de-googled last year.
PS: I use Brave, Android, flutter & duck.com, which only exists to its quality today because of Google.
Oops, by 'target', I meant on the receiving end of exploitation (governments/ politics/ free speech). You might consider targeted adverts exploitation, but I didn't include that in the use of 'target', because I think people prefer targeted adverts and can just turn them off anyway.
Hi - Startpage person here. Maybe I can clear some stuff up.
1) Startpage provides Google results, but Google never sees you. Startpage submits your query to Google anonymously, then returns Google results to you privately. For more info on we keep your search private: https://www.startpage.com/blog/privacy-awareness/how-does-st....
2) Startpage is HQ'ed in the Netherlands, meaning we don't have to comply with US government or law enforcement and comply with EU/Dutch privacy laws such as GDPR. Also, we’re not likely to receive requests by governments to hand over user data – simply because we don’t have any.
3) In 2019, Startpage announced an investment in Startpage by System1 through Privacy One Group, a wholly-owned subsidiary of System1. With this investment, the plan is to further expand privacy features and reach new users. (Lots of new privacy features in the works!) The Startpage founders have control over the privacy components of Startpage. And! After conversations with the privacy community, Startpage was recently relisted in PrivacyToolsIO. More info on that: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...
I switched to Bing first for all queries that can result in non-PC content, and then discovered that technical search is better on Bing also. I first switched to Firefox because I wanted to read newspapers. I find it hard without Bypass Paywalls Firefox add-on, that is banned by Google Chrome. As a result, Firefox with Bing default search is my browser. Things like deletions of alternative viewpoints (e.g. Dr. Erikson Covid19 briefing yesterday) and unbearable ad load are making me switch from Youtube. Unfortunately there is no good alternative to Youtube yet.
I've found that if you aren't using Chrome while signed in Google account you are punished by annoying recaptchas triggering often and when trying to use Google search, clicking on second on third results page will trigger anti-bot response.
I'm a little bummed out that I just switched back to Chromium after several months on Firefox, but Firefox has some very annoying bugs that were driving me crazy.
On the plus side, it's the only Google software I use on a regular basis.
The most annoying is the way it handles updates. There's no easy way to turn off auto-update (I get updates via my package manager), and the functionality in Firefox is completely broken. It downloads the update and then refuses to open any pages until the browser is restarted, but the restart functionality is broken, and it just exits, losing all of the tabs that were open.
It happened again one day, and when Firefox exited I just started Chromium up instead.
It feels, to me, that Firefox and Mozilla have a very annoying "We know better than you" attitude towards a lot of things. That's great for people who want that, but I don't.
I definitely share the frustration with Firefox refusing to work if it detects that it was updated, and just showing the "Please restart Firefox" page. AFAIK that's a recent addition, and done on purpose, so not a bug. But definitely not the best user experience.
I haven't had a problem restarting Firefox and having all my tabs appearing again. Maybe something is corrupted in your profile?
I also haven't found that to be Mozilla's attitude. Luckily a lot of things are configurable in about:config
Nice one. Similarly, I removed my sites from the Google search index by blocking their crawlers. Someone wants to find my content, they better use a different search engine. Anything but Google will do. Their favoring AMP results and forcing websites (the ones that rely on people coming from search for income) to implement that crap ticked me off just a little too much.
Your first concern and reason for De-Googling was privacy, so I'd say moving to iPhone, iCloud, WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) and the like doesn't help you much.
I also think you forgot video-conferencing/video chat. I'd go for Zoom, but there's a bunch of alternatives. Most have their drawbacks.
Lastly, move to Europe where we have GDPR. I actually can not read some news articles that are hosted in the US since the site might not have bothered to implement Privacy features and thus chose to just block EU visitors. Tells you something about the 'issue'.
iOS provides a lot less ways for third party apps to dig into the OS and interact with other apps. The same thing Android fans hate about it, the lock-in and lack of customizability, offers it a lot of additional privacy protection.
In general though, regardless of your phone ecosystem: Remove as many apps as you can from your device. Only install the ones you need and remove ones you don't frequently.
More or less the same as a stock Android device has, the difference is that it keeps on sending data to Apple instead of Google. If you trust Apple at their word about being good stewards of your data you might think this is OK. If you see Apple as the corporate entity it is and you have a healthy distrust of any and all such entities when it comes to them keeping their word when money comes into play you probably want to limit exposure as much as possible.
It's great to compare with people who have done similar, thanks for sharing your journey. It is an inordinate amount of work that non-computer-interested most likely aren't interested in. I do wonder what it takes (restoration of privacy rights enacted through judicial interpretation enforced upon companies like e.g. GDPR?) to have default UX that is E2E across most services, probably widely used companies like Apple doing it (which may compel Google, et al, to?). It surprises me to some degree that companies seem to _want_ the liability involved with associating people with their data? This seems odd, as the data is just as useful assigned to some random identifier that can be carted around the internet that can't be tied to our person, and I wonder how the cost of liability remains worth it when technologically it's unnecessary. The human aspect of social networking seems like the weak heel for removing names there, but still things like chat seem like things companies wouldn't want to store (who knows how strongly gov is compelling them to do so to make it worthwhile, maybe, with $$$ or threats). Even things like imessage, most people use icloud to backup and in this case the messages are recoverable by Apple (for law enforcement as it is or their own purposes maybe, more cynically) - this is heavily marketed E2E but in practice isn't, Apple says so on their security page even (this is nice of them): https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 - I hope that as an industry we can work towards pushing ephemeral UX that users can adjust to but it will take adjusting, nobody needs a message from Nonna from 2014 and if it was the prized bread recipe, save it somewhere else! In any event, I hope this continues to get better for the lay user.
I haven't changed most of my choices since making the switch. I do use mullvad with wireguard now and I consider moving off of 1.1.1.1 for similar reasons to leaving google (see recent news about large gov partner here). I don't have many complaints. In the past year, I've also stopped reading twitter/reddit and moved to reading the news once a week in some attempt to rewire my brain, I'd say it's mostly good, I spend more time thinking and reading more interesting things and it gives me some perspective, the trade offs are being more disconnected from society (not up to date on memes, miss seeing what friends are cooking!) which has pros/cons. I'm rethinking this, it's all about values really, I do think social media can be used in a privacy preserving way to still keep in touch with friends/family (fingerprinting is slight issue) that doesn't have to constantly fight for your dopamine receptors. Anyway, it's interesting to discuss with like minded people, I know very few who aren't constantly plugged in now and it can be hard to relate (ie talk about more interesting things imho).
- there’s less ads (you can turn them off completely, but I’ve only seen one ad on the front page at most which is ok for me)
- not as SEOed (still not great though)
- the box on the side is often more useful, e.g. Wikipedia instead of shopping ads
- on mobile Safari I use the bangs [0] which have a sort of Omnibox experience
[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang
(Edited formatting)