good time to kick google out of your life imo basically the only products they haven't killed anyway are search and mail and their search is absolute garbage now - ThreadSky

some.egrets.ca • 28 days ago

good time to kick google out of your life imo

basically the only products they haven't killed anyway are search and mail and their search is absolute garbage now

Reposted from Jerad Walker

Freedom fries geography

Comments

sparkyblue.bsky.social•27 days ago

YouTube is a Google product, where else can I go? I haven't found a decent competitor for long form videos.

some.egrets.ca•27 days ago

don't have a good answer for that one, they're more or less a monopoly there. similarly hard to avoid the twitch/youtube duopoly in streaming, sometimes your hand is just forced

horse.mom•28 days ago

What's the move? Was considering Proton but they're Trumpy, too :(

xershadowtail.bsky.social•28 days ago

Would be setting up your own e-mail server, but e-mail servers are pretty messy and clunky. Best I found so far is opensmptd.

some.egrets.ca•28 days ago

i get why technically proficient people would lean this way but i don't think i could ever recommend self-host as a realistic answer to a general audience

hell, i've hosted email before and even *i* would never do it again if there's any other alternative

xershadowtail.bsky.social•28 days ago

Yeah self hosting e-mail fucking sucks lol, there is DKIM and lots of other things you need. Also sometimes e-mail servers just do things that make no sense. Postfix has super complicated routing stuff which 99% of the time is pointless and breaks for no reason.

some.egrets.ca•28 days ago

postfix is my go-to but im already familiar with a number of its capabilities (including how to do DKIM) so it's not particularly burdensome

i've had to use some of its advanced filters and rewriting capabilities for work

some.egrets.ca•28 days ago

i honestly don't have a good answer for search. as far as i can tell they're all AI riddled now. no matter what you're going to compromise

for mail i've been using fastmail and a lot of security conscious tech types i know also do this, so i think it's a safe enough recommend

roho.kittyfox.social•28 days ago

For search, me and Grave switched to Kagi about a year ago, and have been very happy. It's a paid product, but it's been worth it. Can de-prioritize certain sites or AI results, and no sponsored results, tracking, or ads. I think there's a free account tier with a few hundred searches for trying out

some.egrets.ca•28 days ago

yeah my opinion on that one is a little fuzzy, im not ready to hard recommend it yet. the guy in charge got real weird in people's replies about tech being neutral that one time and they pay Brendan Eich's company for data. Which sucks!

And they are still big on AI even if you can disable all of it

some.egrets.ca•28 days ago

but OTOH the results and feature sets (being able to ban sites or create lenses) are quite good and while google may be the default, using it is still a choice and it is far from ethically neutral, so im not really sure where to land on that in terms of a recommendation yet

some.egrets.ca•28 days ago

they're still hosted by a Five Eyes country so you're not gaining in terms of avoiding surveillance vs google (if that's something you value) but imho email is not fit for purpose for that anyway (use signal)

but as a service they have been reliable and i've had no issues with the interface

ayyitsfade.bsky.social•27 days ago

I think now more than ever I need to look into proton mail. Idc if I have to pay a subscription for a mail service, but I need to finally kick google to the curb

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