I love that other companies have sustainable alternatives to Google services. But these articles looks more like hype train and doesn’t really add any new value for me.
You are not building something new switching from one big corp to another small company that want to become another big company next day.
Probably I’m getting old but I remember times when Google doesn’t exists. We had software for files, messages, calls, calendars etc. It was based on different protocols, may be less secure and more naive. But it was ok for these days.
There is life outside of Google, and always was. May be for “millenials” you need to be brave to leave this circle, but I don't getting it. What is so special in using other providers? Is it just... normal?
The point of this article is to switch from one Google for a lot of services to a disparate group of providers for same services... if one of the service providers goes away, or is no longer palatable, only the service they provide needs to be relocated.
Google can suspend your account and the 20-30 things you depend on them can go away (or, at least, be unavailable in a customized fashion based on your own data). That's less of a risk if you use different providers for different services.
>May be for “millenials” you need to be brave to leave this circle, but I don't getting it.
I don't think anyone is considering themselves brave for decoupling themselves from the Google-sphere. Leaving social media is a far greater step with ramifications, real, imaginary or simply comparatively, that I would commend younger people for being brave should they take the step. It's something that's truly going against the grain.
I think the dearth of these type blog posts is to a) recognize that it's easy to encapsulate much of your digital reliance on Google and its services and therefore b) Real, or imaginary, it's quite difficult to take the step of decoupling from it and finally c) show that it is possible and less burdensome than people currently encapsulated believe it will be.
The authors slant on this is a little different from some others that we've seen on here - Google can shut down your entire online ecosystem with the click of a button should you infringe some arbitrary standards set in T&Cs riddled with legalese, designed for people to not read. A close call opened his eyes, and he made the steps to decouple from Google. I don't think he's looking for some to cry "Oh my, you are so brave!" for doing so.
> You are not building something new switching from one big corp to another small company that want to become another big company next day.
This. At some point you have to trust someone.
Even if you're off Google you're leaking data with your phone, credit card, smart TV, ISP, genetic testing, etc.
I know privacy isn't all or nothing but with Email the party I'm communicating with already has a copy of the communication that they could forward to anyone or save with any other provider.
I'd say ethics might be a larger reason to switch.
It is considered normal to share trivialities online.
You may cynically consider it "building an online presence", but more generously people like to share things... even obvious things... like this comment I'm writing.
> You are not building something new switching from one big corp to another small company that want to become another big company next day.
So what? The point is to have different services upon different companies, even if tomorrow DuckDuckGo becomes a giant (unlikely anyways) the idea is to use it only for search not for everything.
> May be for “millenials” you need to be brave to leave this circle, but I don't getting it.
The article clearly states is for pragmatical reasons, where do you came out with him needing to be "brave" to do it?
>What is so special in using other providers? Is it just... normal?
As special as not helping yet another monopoly that has vast control over most people's lives, yeah maybe thats not so special to you and thats fine but it still a reasonable cause to advocate for.
You ask why to things the article already started talking about. What do you think about what the article has already said about these things?
Also note most of the things they have moved to are self hosted. For instance Cloudron could close tomorrow and they would still own their email address. Seems quite different than moving from a big company to a small company that wants to be a big company.
Five of his switches were to nextcloud, which is self hosted and open source. One was to self hosted email. Many of the others were things like web search, browser, etc, where it’s hard to avoid a company.
> You are not building something new switching from one big corp to another small company that want to become another big company next day.
Switch to another small one when they start to get big. Try to keep them all balanced. If only one person doing that was enough to get a nice competitive market...
> What is so special in using other providers? Is it just... normal?
It's probably not normal. I've heard of Google, but not Fastmail, Matomo, Nextcloud, Collabra, Plex, Jellyfin, F-Droid, Aurora, Lineage, PinePhone, Simple Mobile Tools, Hover, Matrix, PocketCasts, AntennaPod, or "Ting".
Exactly what you imply with your nostalgia for PIMs: increased fragmentation. There is value in witholding information/data/usage from Google (or FB, or Amazon, or Palantir, etc.) -- particularly personal data that is most valuable in aggregate -- value that reflects a decreased ability to cause problems, worries, and/or concerns in users' lives.
> There is life outside of Google, and always was.
I had a collection of animations related to lambda calculus and alife on g+. Well, now is back online and moreover it is better, because I can add the option to remake these animations live, with js.
The same goes for Facebook. My company uses a legimate Business Account to handle ads of our clients. Nothing shady there. Regular SMB ads. More or less a month ago i receive an email the whole account has been blocked due to some violations. Whole freaking account. Without any warnings. We had clear history. And this means essencially you can close your company if you run only FB ads because you can not create another ads account.
Eventually they recovered the account in 48 hours and wrote they are sorry.
But the thing is it does not solve the problem. You can loose your business just by a system mistake in a second.
And it seems like there is always a way out. But there is not always. Really, does a company of a size of a Facebook or Google care about one person or one small business?
I had a Instagram account for 10 years with my photos and fought 6 months to get it back after hacker takeover. Believe me i have tried everything to get it back. And no, there was no way. There is no number you can call to fix it.
Its just so dangerous to have such single points of failure nowadays like Facebook or Google. Both for business and personal use. Its just great to hear a person who was able to remove it.
Has anyone else had experience with getting their Google account suspended? I literally use it for everything in my life, and without it I would probably lose access to a lot. I would change away from Google in a heartbeat but it just seems like too much effort if I can avoid getting my account suspended in the first place.
If anyone has gotten their account suspended, what was it for and how can I avoid it?
What's reasonable is if you want to avoid using Google services (for whatever reason), then you do not need to be fanatical about it. Move off gradually, one service at a time, and keep using some Google services, if you really must - why not?
This is what I've done over the past few years and it was much easier than I thought. Although, I was never too deep into Google's ecosystem to begin with. The only thing that really remains for me now is the occasional YouTube video (I don't even use an account for that anymore), and Chrome extensions.
For most people, I'd imagine "degoogling" seems pretty daunting at first, but if you do it gradually, you'll have rid yourself of Google before you know it. You'll also be supporting a better future for everyone. I don't mean that in an anti-Google way. I mean it in a pro-indie-dev (or small company) way and a pro-decentralized way, the way the internet is supposed to be.
Competition is always a good thing, in the context of goods and services, at least.
I think it's much better in the long term if we support businesses that specialize in doing one thing and doing it extremely well.
It may even be reasonable to think of businesses (companies) like you would well-architected software, where businesses that do one thing well are like small modules designed for a specific purpose, simple and predictable, easy to replace with something better if needed, without affecting much else in your life... while Google is like a monstrous spaghetti codebase with too many entangled dependencies, where changing a single thing has the potential to adversely affect many other things in your life.
Who can afford for their main email account (gsuite, paid), cloud hosting (if you use it, maybe even for business), means of payment (gpay), backup and storage (drive) to get banned/locked without meaningful support just because you happen to post a comment on a yt video that some googler or algorithm found offensive/non-pc or you happened to log into your account from the wrong IP address, city or continent?
As soon as I started travelling frequently, gmail/google was not longer an option. You can't rely on it. Can't trust it.
The logic applies to basically ALL cloud based services.
We had our entire company profile for Indeed disabled because a couple of our ads were commission-based positions - which only became an issue when paused those postings (because they don't care while you're giving them money).
Their appeals process was non-existent, and they turned off everything - the whole account - so I couldn't even post for an accountant.
Literally all cloud based companies have this danger.
I haven't used Google for anything but search in years. It just seemed unnecessary. Mail is on Thunderbird connected to an IMAP server. Browser is Firefox. Phone is Android minus all the Google stuff, plus FDroid. Phone mail is K-9 mail. Maps are on ZNavi. Location provider is Mozilla. Software development and docs are on Github. Backups are on iDrive. Videos are uploaded to Vimeo. OS is Ubuntu LTS. Sometimes I use Discord.
A few months back, I switched my default browser to Bing, because Google was returning too many ads above the fold.
No big deal. Just fewer headaches without Google and Microsoft.
Isn't a reasonable solution to pay google for gsuite? It's $50* per year or something? Then the "there's nobody to phone and no appeal and data could just be _gone_" concern goes out the window.
Main reason is don't seriously use Google or any social network anymore is because of privacy. They never respect my privacy. OK, i still use their services, but just for non-serious work.
It depends, I do not use gmail for personal/private messages just work and login to webpages, I do not use maps or location or assistance on my phone either, but this story still sounds scary because google has many products and a ban on youtube(where they forced people to use google accounts) will lock you out of everything. Part of the solution for this problem would be if you get a ban on Youtube you can still use gmail and the other products. Other part of the solution is to tell people what exactly they did wrong, I sometimes got warnings from Sony that I did something against the TOS and not to do it again but not details what I did (my son plays games on a PS4, I tried to look into the chats he made recently but I could not find anything to explain it so I tried the best I could to explain him to watch his language because he could get locked out the games) and like others said some human support would also help a lot.
If google gave a crap they would put a phone number to that email so you can talk to a human and resolve any issue. From numerous conversations in HN and iRL, everyone who has a spat with the G-people is royally screwed. A true hostage.
What you suggest would be great for the user. But why would google care for that? You broke their rules, you have to pay. Here, have some pain.
I don't blame them for having rules. I blaim the G-users for accepting them and giving google all this power, that is often (and stupidly) mis/ab-used.
On the other hand, I have to admit that for less technical folks, having all-in-one is a life saver. Vast majority of the member of this forum though do not belong to that group.
I have a Google One subscription so I pay Google for storage. Google could suspend my account and I'd have no recourse whatsoever? I'd have no way of getting my 10s of thousands of photos back?
Yes, most subscriptions generally say in the ToS that the account and all assets may be closed/deleted at the sole discretion of the provider. It's anecdotally rare, but depending on the company (quality of customer service), it may be irreversible, or take a long time to fix.
My personal rule is to never trust a third-party to "protect" my data; there is no such thing in today's market and legal frameworks (unless you have a face-to-face relationship, and even then, backups!)
I've had a problem with trying to sign into my approved AdSense account the past few weeks. "We encountered an error. An engineer is looking into the issue." No way to contact them. I'm done with Google as well. I'm never going to use a service that doesn't provide a way to contact support.
While I read other opinions about this article not bringing anything new that we already know, as an Enterprise user this reminds me that the people running Google Cloud is the same that comes from this consumer world or new grads with 0 Enterprise experience, which believe their product is perfect and user is wrong. We just completed an evaluation of AWS, Azure and GCP and our leadership raised this concern...which came true when opening GCP account and support was not as responsive as AWS, or Azure. AWS and Azure I even had real people calling us and contact us to understand our use case...I know GCP is bring more people from Oracle and other companies which can help them change this, in the mean time, we still will.invest in AWS, Azure and IBM
I'm not necessarily anti-Google, but only use their services when I consider them best of breed. That's my policy across the board. Gmail in 2004 was as good as it got, then everyone caught up, just lately in 2019 did I find Gmail to have gone beyond the pack again.
The ability to schedule emails in Gmail is something I've missed from Outlook (desktop) for a long time, and it does it serverside unlike the desktop Outlook app.
The downside to Gmail is that the default user experience is pretty poor. You have to enable the preview pane yourself, and if you don't, you also would have to enable the auto opening of the next email after you delete one otherwise it takes you back to the list. Gmail's list of emails has the star on the far left, and all other quick controls on the right. It's pretty absurd.
But if you disable categories and the rest of Google's convoluted ideas, enable the preview pane and set it to the compact layout, I haven't seen a better free webmail today.
I would switch to Outlook.com just to split my email account from Youtube and Google Maps, if Microsoft supported scheduled sends. iCloud.com would be my first choice but they don't have a robust calendar system like Outlook and Gmail (iOS reminders only, no email reminders). Same concern with ProtonMail (I never saw the appeal to FastMail). Hosting my own is a non-starter because I feel with all the competition in webmail that I really shouldn't have to, there are good free services.
I was deeply embedded in the Google ecosystem ...
I would upload all of my family photos to Google Photos and all of my personal documents to Google Drive ...
I used Google Hangouts ...
My home is covered with Google Homes ...
I have easily invested thousands of dollars into my Google ...
Honest question: why should one take advice from someone showing such a systematic pattern of poor judgement?
Tentative answer to your question, with an optimistic outlook: Good judgement comes from experience. You get experience by learning from mistakes. Mistakes come from bad judgement.
Maybe because just a few short years ago Google was the darling of the internet because search and chrome were better than anything else. People believed the do no evil spin. And back then why wouldn't they?
I setup a personal NextCloud instance on a $5 Digital Ocean last year, and along with Fastmail, it replaced all the Google services I've been using. It took about an hour to get up and running, it went through version updates without a hiccup, and never gave me any trouble.
I found it to be completely hassle free, and I can highly recommend it to anybody looking to take back control of their privacy.
It's not accurate to imply this is so easy.
You're now responsible for your data, security and uptime.
That means patching, backups and plenty of ops work.
I think the key here is you have tried the other options, and importantly - you clearly know how to set those other services up if need be. For many if not most people, that would be entering the wild unknown.
I also switched to Fastmail too. Its interface is rudimentary similar to Google few years ago. It has full suite of services like calendar, notes, storage...
What I like is its simplicity which Gmail may bloat with too many features. One notable feature of Fastmail is alias: you can create other emails alias to your main account and use that to create different rules. Super handy and convenient. If you worry about encryption, probably ProtonMail is a better choice. For me, Fastmail is good for my usage.
If you're going to plug referral links for credit, may I suggest that you switch to significantly cheaper services that are also privacy focused? You can choose from mailbox.org, mailfence.com, runbox.com, migadu.com, mxroute.com, posteo.de (no own domain support), Tutanota, ProtonMail and many more.
[+] [-] xenator|6 years ago|reply
You are not building something new switching from one big corp to another small company that want to become another big company next day.
Probably I’m getting old but I remember times when Google doesn’t exists. We had software for files, messages, calls, calendars etc. It was based on different protocols, may be less secure and more naive. But it was ok for these days.
There is life outside of Google, and always was. May be for “millenials” you need to be brave to leave this circle, but I don't getting it. What is so special in using other providers? Is it just... normal?
[+] [-] jvagner|6 years ago|reply
Google can suspend your account and the 20-30 things you depend on them can go away (or, at least, be unavailable in a customized fashion based on your own data). That's less of a risk if you use different providers for different services.
[+] [-] cmdshiftf4|6 years ago|reply
I don't think anyone is considering themselves brave for decoupling themselves from the Google-sphere. Leaving social media is a far greater step with ramifications, real, imaginary or simply comparatively, that I would commend younger people for being brave should they take the step. It's something that's truly going against the grain.
I think the dearth of these type blog posts is to a) recognize that it's easy to encapsulate much of your digital reliance on Google and its services and therefore b) Real, or imaginary, it's quite difficult to take the step of decoupling from it and finally c) show that it is possible and less burdensome than people currently encapsulated believe it will be.
The authors slant on this is a little different from some others that we've seen on here - Google can shut down your entire online ecosystem with the click of a button should you infringe some arbitrary standards set in T&Cs riddled with legalese, designed for people to not read. A close call opened his eyes, and he made the steps to decouple from Google. I don't think he's looking for some to cry "Oh my, you are so brave!" for doing so.
[+] [-] awb|6 years ago|reply
This. At some point you have to trust someone.
Even if you're off Google you're leaking data with your phone, credit card, smart TV, ISP, genetic testing, etc.
I know privacy isn't all or nothing but with Email the party I'm communicating with already has a copy of the communication that they could forward to anyone or save with any other provider.
I'd say ethics might be a larger reason to switch.
[+] [-] avip|6 years ago|reply
You may cynically consider it "building an online presence", but more generously people like to share things... even obvious things... like this comment I'm writing.
[+] [-] mattigames|6 years ago|reply
So what? The point is to have different services upon different companies, even if tomorrow DuckDuckGo becomes a giant (unlikely anyways) the idea is to use it only for search not for everything.
> May be for “millenials” you need to be brave to leave this circle, but I don't getting it.
The article clearly states is for pragmatical reasons, where do you came out with him needing to be "brave" to do it?
>What is so special in using other providers? Is it just... normal?
As special as not helping yet another monopoly that has vast control over most people's lives, yeah maybe thats not so special to you and thats fine but it still a reasonable cause to advocate for.
[+] [-] zamadatix|6 years ago|reply
Also note most of the things they have moved to are self hosted. For instance Cloudron could close tomorrow and they would still own their email address. Seems quite different than moving from a big company to a small company that wants to be a big company.
[+] [-] mapgrep|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jolmg|6 years ago|reply
Switch to another small one when they start to get big. Try to keep them all balanced. If only one person doing that was enough to get a nice competitive market...
[+] [-] stanferder|6 years ago|reply
It's probably not normal. I've heard of Google, but not Fastmail, Matomo, Nextcloud, Collabra, Plex, Jellyfin, F-Droid, Aurora, Lineage, PinePhone, Simple Mobile Tools, Hover, Matrix, PocketCasts, AntennaPod, or "Ting".
[+] [-] rhizome|6 years ago|reply
Exactly what you imply with your nostalgia for PIMs: increased fragmentation. There is value in witholding information/data/usage from Google (or FB, or Amazon, or Palantir, etc.) -- particularly personal data that is most valuable in aggregate -- value that reflects a decreased ability to cause problems, worries, and/or concerns in users' lives.
[+] [-] xorand|6 years ago|reply
I had a collection of animations related to lambda calculus and alife on g+. Well, now is back online and moreover it is better, because I can add the option to remake these animations live, with js.
http://imar.ro/~mbuliga/collection.html
[+] [-] dkersten|6 years ago|reply
According to the Wikipedia definition of millennial, a large chunk of millennials also likely remember a time before Google.
[+] [-] tomaszs|6 years ago|reply
Eventually they recovered the account in 48 hours and wrote they are sorry.
But the thing is it does not solve the problem. You can loose your business just by a system mistake in a second.
And it seems like there is always a way out. But there is not always. Really, does a company of a size of a Facebook or Google care about one person or one small business?
I had a Instagram account for 10 years with my photos and fought 6 months to get it back after hacker takeover. Believe me i have tried everything to get it back. And no, there was no way. There is no number you can call to fix it.
Its just so dangerous to have such single points of failure nowadays like Facebook or Google. Both for business and personal use. Its just great to hear a person who was able to remove it.
[+] [-] Mistri|6 years ago|reply
If anyone has gotten their account suspended, what was it for and how can I avoid it?
[+] [-] telegrammae|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loh|6 years ago|reply
For most people, I'd imagine "degoogling" seems pretty daunting at first, but if you do it gradually, you'll have rid yourself of Google before you know it. You'll also be supporting a better future for everyone. I don't mean that in an anti-Google way. I mean it in a pro-indie-dev (or small company) way and a pro-decentralized way, the way the internet is supposed to be.
Competition is always a good thing, in the context of goods and services, at least.
I think it's much better in the long term if we support businesses that specialize in doing one thing and doing it extremely well.
It may even be reasonable to think of businesses (companies) like you would well-architected software, where businesses that do one thing well are like small modules designed for a specific purpose, simple and predictable, easy to replace with something better if needed, without affecting much else in your life... while Google is like a monstrous spaghetti codebase with too many entangled dependencies, where changing a single thing has the potential to adversely affect many other things in your life.
[+] [-] thatsenough|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ReverseCold|6 years ago|reply
The wonders of ActivityPub...
[+] [-] 2ion|6 years ago|reply
As soon as I started travelling frequently, gmail/google was not longer an option. You can't rely on it. Can't trust it.
That, on top of everything else is a dealbreaker.
[+] [-] koheripbal|6 years ago|reply
We had our entire company profile for Indeed disabled because a couple of our ads were commission-based positions - which only became an issue when paused those postings (because they don't care while you're giving them money).
Their appeals process was non-existent, and they turned off everything - the whole account - so I couldn't even post for an accountant.
Literally all cloud based companies have this danger.
[+] [-] Animats|6 years ago|reply
A few months back, I switched my default browser to Bing, because Google was returning too many ads above the fold.
No big deal. Just fewer headaches without Google and Microsoft.
[+] [-] plg|6 years ago|reply
*edit: $6 per month so $72 per year
[+] [-] revskill|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simion314|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xwowsersx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abhisuri97|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 9nGQluzmnq3M|6 years ago|reply
https://takeout.google.com/settings/takeout
[+] [-] HenryBemis|6 years ago|reply
If google gave a crap they would put a phone number to that email so you can talk to a human and resolve any issue. From numerous conversations in HN and iRL, everyone who has a spat with the G-people is royally screwed. A true hostage.
What you suggest would be great for the user. But why would google care for that? You broke their rules, you have to pay. Here, have some pain.
I don't blame them for having rules. I blaim the G-users for accepting them and giving google all this power, that is often (and stupidly) mis/ab-used.
On the other hand, I have to admit that for less technical folks, having all-in-one is a life saver. Vast majority of the member of this forum though do not belong to that group.
[+] [-] xwowsersx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] K0SM0S|6 years ago|reply
Yes, most subscriptions generally say in the ToS that the account and all assets may be closed/deleted at the sole discretion of the provider. It's anecdotally rare, but depending on the company (quality of customer service), it may be irreversible, or take a long time to fix.
My personal rule is to never trust a third-party to "protect" my data; there is no such thing in today's market and legal frameworks (unless you have a face-to-face relationship, and even then, backups!)
[+] [-] Havoc|6 years ago|reply
There is probably some form of recourse available, but knowing google you'll be talking to bots.
[+] [-] oth001|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spicyramen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BuckRogers|6 years ago|reply
The ability to schedule emails in Gmail is something I've missed from Outlook (desktop) for a long time, and it does it serverside unlike the desktop Outlook app.
The downside to Gmail is that the default user experience is pretty poor. You have to enable the preview pane yourself, and if you don't, you also would have to enable the auto opening of the next email after you delete one otherwise it takes you back to the list. Gmail's list of emails has the star on the far left, and all other quick controls on the right. It's pretty absurd.
But if you disable categories and the rest of Google's convoluted ideas, enable the preview pane and set it to the compact layout, I haven't seen a better free webmail today.
I would switch to Outlook.com just to split my email account from Youtube and Google Maps, if Microsoft supported scheduled sends. iCloud.com would be my first choice but they don't have a robust calendar system like Outlook and Gmail (iOS reminders only, no email reminders). Same concern with ProtonMail (I never saw the appeal to FastMail). Hosting my own is a non-starter because I feel with all the competition in webmail that I really shouldn't have to, there are good free services.
[+] [-] new2628|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tempodox|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spearchucker|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yogthos|6 years ago|reply
I found it to be completely hassle free, and I can highly recommend it to anybody looking to take back control of their privacy.
[+] [-] awill|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danemorgan|6 years ago|reply
As for the rest, the services I use, I use them because they work better than any of the other options I have tried.
I'll admit that that amounts to as substantial number of services.
[+] [-] SanchoPanda|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godzillabrennus|6 years ago|reply
It’s always been inexpensive enough to buy a domain and have an email address associated with it.
I also don’t understand startup founders who tie personal emails into a business email account.
Keep a separate email.
[+] [-] aladine|6 years ago|reply
What I like is its simplicity which Gmail may bloat with too many features. One notable feature of Fastmail is alias: you can create other emails alias to your main account and use that to create different rules. Super handy and convenient. If you worry about encryption, probably ProtonMail is a better choice. For me, Fastmail is good for my usage.
P/s: if you want to sign up for Fastmail, here is my referral link https://ref.fm/u12211285
[+] [-] newscracker|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carapace|6 years ago|reply
Folks, back up your shi^H^Htuff.