• BroBot9000@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Getting worse is putting it lightly.

    Get the fuck off Google services if you can. Highly recommend Proton mail and drive as a replacement.

      • Nikki@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        can vouch for mega, been using it for 8 years now with no real issues. only sticking point is file download limits with Firefox, and thats just because im too lazy to download the desktop app

        • tibi@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          I hate services that force you to download an app when the functionality could be provided in browser. Apps have a lot more permissions to access things that wouldn’t be accessible in browser.

      • univers3man@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        You’d have to be really committed. There’s more admin work than you think to make sure you’re not insecure or getting blocked.

      • astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz
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        4 months ago

        I use a cheap VPS to host my email server. It’s a bit easier than running it solely at home, but there’s a lot of annoying work to “verify” yourself. Once you get your DNS records good, you shouldn’t be blocked after that (unlike a home server). It only costs me $5/month plus the domain, which I think is money well spent. Doing the admin work to make sure I’m secure still needs to happen, but I don’t mind that work and find it fun.

      • BroBot9000@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Been using their paid email, drive and vpn for the last couple of years and their service has been flawless in my experience. Great apps and never had an outage or issues once.

        Free versions are available but the paid version is well worth it.

        • slooopy_potatoe@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          I’ve been with them for a couple of years too and I use all their services (mail, calendar, drive, VPN, pass and simplelogin) but calling it flawless is a bit of an overstatement.

          Their outside communication is nonexistent at best, development speed is unbearably slow and Linux support, the most privacy countious user-base?, is lacking a lot.

          Hopefully in the next couple years they sinally manage to release contact sync and a Linux client for Drive.

          • micka190@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Their outside communication is nonexistent at best

            Eh, they’re decently active on Reddit, I guess. They send the occasional newsletter regarding new features if you don’t unsubscribe (and they’re pretty good at not spamming with those, imo).

            development speed is unbearably slow

            I see people say this all the time, and while feature updates are kind of slow, I’m also not lacking anything, personally. I would appreciate it if they smoothed-out SimpleLogin’s extension, though. That thing is weirdly clunky to use.

            Agree on the Linux bit, though. I’m surprised they haven’t put more work into that.

            Overall, I’ve been a happy customer for a few years, personally.

    • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      Just signed up after they announced the non-profit and migrated all my mail. So far so good.

      I wouldn’t go from Google to another for-profit though. I know how it ends.

        • Konala Koala@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          I just signed up for that just to check it out and compare it, and it looks like upgrading the storage on it is more expensive than Google Drive.

          • BroBot9000@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Yeah but that’s expected. It’s difficult to compete as a smaller company compared to what Google can offer.

            It’s the price of privacy and to be outside of the google ecosystem.

            • Konala Koala@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              Apparently, doing a sync with it just on my documents and photos, it ended up filling up the Proton Drive and giving hundreds of errors on one of my Windows 10 computers.

          • justaderp@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            There’s an incredible story behind it. But, the short form is that Proton is more expensive because they’re not harvesting your private information. In a few months the law will prevent them from doing for as long as the core fiscal law and Proton exist (at least decades).

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            4 months ago

            If price is main concern, you still have options, but you’ll need to be a lot more specific about what you need. For example:

            • direct Drive replacements - OneDrive and Amazon Drive
            • just file storage - DropBox, and MEGA
            • backups - NordLocker, Backblaze
            • hosted and self-hosted cloud platforms - OwnCloud and NextCloud, use Backblaze B2 for storage

            I’m doing the last one. I have NextCloud installed on my custom NAS (just openSUSE Leap with some drives) and am working on configuring B2 as a backup service. It’s more expensive than Drive, but it’s also more versatile (streams movies to TV, use as Linux package cache for faster upgrades, etc).

            Each of these are similar in price to Google Drive, but with a different feature set. Some are cheaper.

            • Konala Koala@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              Sorry for not being more specific about what I need, I will explain it here.

              With Google Drive, it gets assigned to a drive letter on my computer which is H: here and I’m not sure if any other Drive alternatives do that or not.

              Right now, I currently pay $3 USD a month for 300 GBs of Google Drive space and they appear to go up with 5TBs for $25 USD a month and $10TBs for $50 USD a month.

              I’m not interested in One Drive as that is Microsoft’s Shit.

              • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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                4 months ago

                Here are options for to mount Backblaze B2 as a drive. It’s $6/TB/month, and I think they allow <1TB, so for 300GB you’d pay ~$2/month. So I think they’re pretty competitive, but I’m not familiar with Google Drive’s terms. They’re certainly in the same ballpark, if not cheaper, but it depends on your egress and Google Drive’s policies around that (how much you download from their service).

                • Konala Koala@lemmy.world
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                  4 months ago

                  Well, for one thing, I would want to find out if there is a way to mount a remote drive service to a drive letter on a Windows machine like Google Drive so that I can have it as a backup option that would keep my stuff privacy, and not scraped by some AI LLM.

    • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      duckduckgo and yandex.

      restricting your search to r*ddit to filter out blogspam.

  • Fermion@feddit.nl
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    4 months ago

    Is GN going to put Google on a Performance Improvement Plan like they did with Asus?

  • MuchPineapples@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    It’s not even that their results suck, per se, but they straight up ignore most of my search query and focus on one or two words only. Obviously that makes your search results suck.

    • tempest@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      It is just a matter of incentives.

      Remember Google is paid by advertising dollars. So the incentives are to feed you the maximum amount of ads with the minimum amount of content so that you don’t leave for something else.

    • irotsoma@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I’m slowly moving away to open source, self-hosted applications where possible. Changed search to a combination of Gibiru and Yep. Email to a mailcow server I host on a vps, and I’m moving photos to an Immich server I’m setting up. Home Automation is next, I have a Raspberry Pi 5 to act as the Home Assistant server. And a few other projects in the works to split from Google as much as I can and mostly it is all better.

    • Fermion@feddit.nl
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      4 months ago

      Yahoo is still around in some form or another.

      Alphabet has enough money to persist well after they lose relevance.

      • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
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        4 months ago

        Similar tactic among all the large tech corpos, switch focus to IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, become the backbone of the modern computing landscape.

        It’s basically a slow switch to becoming critical international infrastructure like power grids, water ways, and gas/oil pipelines.

        This all while locking you in as much as possible and milking as much value as they can squeeze.

          • laurelraven@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            4 months ago

            I’m pretty sure their ad revenue from their own pages is a tiny fraction of their overall advertising revenue… They basically own the advertising market online, almost anywhere you see ads googie is getting a cut

    • eee@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      I mean IBM is still traded but it’s a shadow if it’s former self

  • Unlocalhost@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    You either die a hero or live and watch yourself turn into a villian.

    Tom’s hardware, woot, and most recently donut media just to name a few. All were once the place to go, they all were bought out by bigger interest and eventually became the villian.

      • blackluster117@possumpat.io
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        4 months ago

        They’ve been bought by an entertainment parent company, which is why the glut of sponsorships along with their content leaning towards pure entertainment instead of including educational and DIY content. Zach and Jeremiah started their own thing recently and explain in their first video.

  • Wrench@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    It’s weird that they don’t really address the biggest reason Googles algorithm is worse now. The rampant exploitation of SEO.

    Bad actors abuse the system in an attempt to be the first result, regardless of relevancy. It’s harder for Google to sift the chaff out than it used to be, because they’re flooded with content claiming to be related to the search keys.

  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    "Google is getting worse. Now watch me talk about the situation on a youtube video. Youtube is a property owned by google. "

    • Hal-5700X@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      4 months ago

      Will we do have Youtube alternatives (Odysee & Rumble). But people can’t filter out the stuff, they don’t like on Odysee & Rumble. They can do that on Youtube but not on Youtube alternatives. So yeah.

      • TimLovesTech (AuDHD)(he/him)@badatbeing.social
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        4 months ago

        Just took a look at them, and Rumble is for sure a hard pass. The 2 rows under “news” is all far-right extremist videos, which is great if you are aiming for the Parlor/Truth Social/Nazi and Nazi sympathizers of the internet, but I think you’ll miss most of the world going that toxic on the frontage.

        • astronaut_sloth@mander.xyz
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          4 months ago

          There’s also PeerTube, the Fediverse counterpart to YouTube. Unfortunately, while there’s some good stuff you can find (and some re-uploads of YouTube), there’s just not as much content. I’d imagine the userbase is pretty small, too.

          • buttfarts@lemy.lol
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            4 months ago

            I hope the fediverse attracts enough adoption to make it long term viable. I am making an effort to be here more than there for lemmy/Reddit but YouTube is still harder to quit

          • TimLovesTech (AuDHD)(he/him)@badatbeing.social
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            4 months ago

            To your point, the amount of money/effort to even try and rival YouTube (and/or Google) would be a hell of a task for sure. Since you would want it to be open, well moderated (but not so much that the majority of people scream “censorship!”), and be able to store/encode/serve a wild amount of video daily. And the later 2 things get exponentially more difficult as you scale.

            It would need to be like the Fediverse on steroids, doing a distributed filesystem allowing every federated member to host/encode/serve part of the burden (like Kazaa/Limewire/DC++) but in some manner that people could be assured node hosts couldn’t tamper with videos. And then you would also need some sort of reward for creators that wouldn’t somehow lead to greedy power struggles causing an implosion of your open platform.

            Ah, to dream.

            • Hal-5700X@sh.itjust.worksOP
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              4 months ago

              Okay. My point is we have Youtube alternatives. But people don’t use them. Because they can’t filter out the stuff they don’t like.

              • TimLovesTech (AuDHD)(he/him)@badatbeing.social
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                4 months ago

                In their current state, I would argue none of them are actually alternatives in the sense of being a real replacement. None of them is setup to scale, making the moderation/filtering point kinda moot.

    • _sideffect@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I get what you’re saying, but they use the platform to spread the word quicker and reach a bigger audience.