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Yeah, google is great if you dont care about your privacy and dont care how much money you spend.
There is absolutely no reason to use google though. For a great experience you have to pay anyway and that you can as well do with someone with someone who hosts nextcloud for you. Added benefit: your data is not harvested and you can expect the terms to stay the same forever.
and you can expect the terms to stay the same forever
Bit of a reach, but I agree with your other points
Thanks. But if you work with a small hoster, they wont change the terms on you usually. Most of us understand that this is only „legal“, not morally sound.
True, I guess my experience was moreso “we can legally sell out whenever.”
For a long time I used mediatemple for their affordability, flexibility, and scalability
Then they were acquired by godaddy
https://origin-blog.mediatemple.net/news/a-new-chapter-for-media-temple/
Then I used webfaction, for the same reasons. They too were acquired by godaddy
https://groups.google.com/g/cloudy-dev/c/LF1eDRHt1W0
Many of the devs from web faction built opalstack, which I love
But I definitely won’t expect their terms to remain the same forever
Today google search turned on dark mode and trendimg searches against my will once again, makimg me google how to turn them off again.
It's annoying.
I'm pretty neutral towards them. I use Gmail, Drive, and Google News.
Google is unavoidable but I do my best to mitigate the worst parts of their privacy intrusions.
I have a pixel phone running grapheneOS with Google Services Framework installed but without Google Play or Gboard or any of that stuff. For me that's a balance that works.
I host my own email server so no Gmail.
I also host my own Matrix server and avoid WhatsApp where possible (not Google but just as bad if not worse).
I use YouTube but via Newpipe or using Ublock origin on Firefox (not logged in obviously).
Chrome is genuinely worse than Firefox now that Google have made adblocking more difficult with manifest v3.
You just have to decide what the best tradeoff is between privacy and convenience.
I host my own email server so no Gmail.
How are you finding this? How much is it costing you, and how much time/effort does it take for maintenance and also how was it setting up? I've also heard that self-hosting a mail server means your emails usually get marked as spam, have you had this problem? Interested in self-hosting email but I'm not sure it's worth the effort for me and my threat model.
I started in 2012, and it wasn't that difficult. I'd say I do about 30mins of maintenance every other month. It took me a while to work out the config originally, but I wrote a guide afterwards which was really popular for other people doing the same thing (it's quite out of date now but the principles are the same).
Started out using a raspberry pi (which was also hosting a website at the time) but when I moved house to somewhere with a worse internet connection I migrated to a VPS, so there is a cost but it's not enormous, maybe £20/month.
Don't even bother if you can't use a static IP, because all your email will be bounced if your PTR record for the IP (reverse DNS record) doesn't match your domain name.
It got a bit more complicated when people started adding extra layers of spam protection like SPF, DKIM and DMARC, but those are mostly set and forget.
Overall, I'd say it's worth it but only because I find it quite interesting/fun.
For work, sheets is a godsend.
Everything else, i have better software.
I don’t hate Google. I created a Google account before recently to use YouTube.
Mainly because I couldn’t figure out Peertube on the Fediverse.
Chromebooks are cool
I don’t hate Google
i hate Google but I still use YouTube way too much
My stance is neutral, leaning towards negative. I think Google is still full of talented engineers who passionately want to build the best tech, but the higher ups are screwing up as seen everywhere else too. Their basis for all this data collection seems acceptable (personalization) but they're blind to the fact that this information can quickly fall into the wrong hands, like a hacker or bad government.
I still use a Google Pixel with the stock software because of the little things other ROMs don't provide, as well as Maps, Drive, Wallet, YT and Home. For everything else I use alternatives, albeit it's not because of a super strong dislike towards Google itself but because I want to support the competition.
Whoever that person is, they definitely exist. We just haven't seen them (and we probably never will since they're drown in downvotes immediately).
But they'll probably stop liking Google once they learn about the whole "collecting data and selling it to advertisers" thing.
Me. Drive is useful, youtube is addicting, gmail is... fine, once you figure out a few things.
If Nazis made a great product, would you start supporting Nazis?
Nice try, paid Google shill.