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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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Technology
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It may be the last few years of the free web because of Google. Their goals are clear.
Please switch to Firefox, another search engine and another email provider...
I've long been trying to de-googlify myself, but it's certainly ramped up this year.
Been trying out Kagi and just set up proton mail account. Not sure what I'll land on in the end but it's nice trying out newer services.
It is hard when you have a business. You really have to actively try to stay away from them. They control so much business infrastructure.
I know my business partner (god bless him, great friend but...) is super into big tech and every new product they offer. So it's a bit of an uphill battle.
And I'm lucky. I own my own firm. Most people don't have such a luxury.
Google server infrastructure products are almost universally worse than Amazon's. The interfaces, APIs, and documentation look like they were designed by people who don't understand humanity.
Most importantly, they are designed by people that don't use them. Amazon uses AWS themselves, Google doesn't use GCP.
At least they're not as bad as Microsoft. Azure is a goddamn dog with fleas.
I am fortunate enough to have never had MS servers forced upon me.
Good to know.
It's not too hard. The most important things are web search and email. I still use Google Maps. But I don't want my private emails and searches at a company who is user hostile and preditory.
I quite disagree, it is very hard. Sure, switching search engine takes all of two seconds, and email can be had from many vendors free and commercial.
But calendaring! A calendar that is at least somewhat integrated with am email client, supports more than one actual calendar, and has real-world capability to share them with others - "if you succeed in this, two me how."
My calendaring needs might be less restrictive than yours, but Proton offers a nice calendar that from what I understand offers at least some integration with their e-mail client. Have you checked it out?
I use Nextcloud self-maintained on a VPS myself for all my calendaring needs, which is basically keeping track of appointments, syncing via CalDAV to my phone, as well as sharing some sub-calendars with other people. Setting up a Nextcloud-server is admittedly a bit more hassle than just signing up for a service, but also here there are options of making it a bit easier than hosting yourself.
I find Google Maps by far the hardest service to rid myself off, followed by Gmail (the time it takes!!! Been using Proton for two years, still not completely rid of my Gmail-account). I'm slowly getting used to using OSM-based map services more and more.
The Fastmail calendar is pretty good. Just a random page about them: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/shared-calendars/
Ohh, this does indeed look quite fantastic. I am certainly going to look more into this. Thank you!
_Edit: Ah, but $50/user/year. For the whole family that adds up real fast. Still, nice tip.
CalDav? Integrated in nextcloud. Or Mailcow. Why does it needs to be integrated with e-mail? Thunderbird is able to add all invitations or reminders into my CalDav Account.
I found out about Kagi from another Lemmy user and I've been really impressed. I feel like I'm getting better results than Google. I'm using their Personalized Results feature and it helps a ton!
Any recommendations for free email providers?
I'm using proton. I like it a lot.
Nothing is free. How would they make money as a company to pay employees and pay hosting bills?
All these big tech companies are free exactly because they are preditory on users.
Pay for good email like Fastmail or Proton.
I mean, Proton, which you just mentioned, also has a free tier, which is just as usable as Gmail is for 90% of people, myself included.
Proton's free tier is a step to right direction, and at least they don't run a huge advertisement company that could benefit from the free tier users' data. And if you pay for Proton Unlimited, you also get access to SimpleLogin's Premium tier which is nice. I just found this out when I finally bit the bullet and changed away from Gmail over to Proton. Now I don't have to expose my real email address to some random never-to-be-seen-again websites or campaigns if I don't want to.
If one has enough motivation, time and interest in purchasing their own domain, you can get one step forward with changing away from Gmail. Then you can pay something like 5€/month for Proton Mail Plus, use your own domain as your email address and if one day you find a better email provider, you could just change the MX records for that service and wouldn't have to go through all your accounts and update the new address to all the places.
I had pondered moving away from Gmail years and years ever since I found out Google doesn't have any real customer support and HN had stories where people had suddenly been locked out of their Google accounts because of some silly reason and couldn't get their accounts back without some inside connections. At one point most of my digital life was at the mercy of Google and losing access to my Gmail or Google Calendar or G Drive would have been a disaster. Reading all these web-DRM news reminded me that I should continue de-googlefying my life and finally made the change. Firefox has been my primary browser for years and I moved over to iPhone with my phone.
I understand the sentiment, but email is a necessary part of modern life and not everyone has the luxury of paying for it.
A lot of things are necessary parts of modern live and you also have to pay for it, a mobile plan for your smartphone for example.
I had a smartphone but not a mobile plan for years. People can get very creative when times are tough.
Don't get me wrong, I think everybody should have the guarantee for social participation, I'm just saying that Email is no exception. If you did not have a mobile plan for whatever reason, you were just not participating.
Not really; I could do everything everyone else was doing; just not make phone calls or send sms texts. I used wifi to connect to the net and I could still make emergency calls. Im actually considering going back to that to save money, lol.
Well I know you're talking about cutting the cord completely, but if you're in the us TMobile (micro-shilling for a second) has a $15 unlimited talk/text and 2.5g of data prepaid that I used for a few years (until I upgraded) but since I was mostly on wifi it was absolutely viable
Also I guess the sentiment here is to de-google , but I've had my Google voice number for over a decade and I've used that as my primary number even when I haven't had a cell phone provider. I use it for texting and calling and can use it on the PC in a browser window
Alright shilling over, but I guess my point is there's that route or I'm sure countless other options that are more secure you can use so you don't have to do without calling/texting
Nah then gmail is good enough.
Register your own domain name with Gandi and they gift you free email with a choice of two webmail interfaces. It's really good, and owning the domain name enables moving to a different provider later if you wish.
I do use the better options but lets be real, the battle was lost many years ago