Re:Is Facebook Really Scarier Than Google?
by langitbiru on Saturday March 24, 2018 @11:09PM
(#16670473)
Yes, I can live without Google Map, Google Search, GMail, Photos, but Youtube is unavoidable. For me, Youtube is more than just music or cute videos. I learn programming, mathematics, physics a lot from Youtube. :(
Re:Is Facebook Really Scarier Than Google?
by WovenTales on Sunday March 25, 2018 @12:20AM
(#16670740)
It's still not getting completely away from Google, and they could probably still track you through IP, but I've been really happy with the NewPipe client for Android; it's attempting to provide all the features of browsing without falling back on any official API and certainly without needing an account. There are a few features that aren't out yet (most notably comments, notifications, and YT-user playlists, though it can play the latter if you get the link through another browser) but it gives you an offline subscription list and in my opinion is more comfortable to use than the official app.
Re:Is Facebook Really Scarier Than Google?
by TulliusCicero on Sunday March 25, 2018 @04:34AM
(#16671332)
> I use seafile with automated upload and a custom-built photos UI frontend to provide a photo gallery for me, and to allow me to share photos. I use the tensorflow pre-trained example model for object classification to tag the images, it’s good enough.
Possibly the most hacker_news.txt comment in this thread. "Why rely on [popular consumer service] when you could just build your own photos frontend and then set up a machine learning model attached to it? Easy!"
That’s why I said, for normal people this is insanity, but this is Hacker News - no one on this site has an excuse for using GMail. And even the photos part – every week we have another Show HN of someone building some new project with the pretrained tensorflow models.
But yes, my setup is something I don’t expect most people to build for themselves – instead I’d hope that NAS vendors would include similar functionality, and people would start using those instead.
"No one on this site has an excuse for using GMail"... C'mon, now. I get your point, but ease it up a bit.
We can still use products built by companies. The OP has stated he's okay with "paying" using his data for the ease of use and benefits of a commercial service. It's cool you built your own! But there's a reason why GMail exists and is popular.
Here Maps or OpenStreetMap
> No Search
I’ve switched to a mix of Qwant and DuckDuckGo, depending on question
> No GMail
I’ve been self-hosting all my mail for 4 years now, works fine thanks to simple solutions such as this tutorial https://workaround.org/ispmail
> No YouTube
This is the largest issue, but most of what I consume is either music or streams, and most of the streams are also on twitch, and the music is also available for sale on CD, or on Spotify.
> No Photos
I use seafile with automated upload and a custom-built photos UI frontend to provide a photo gallery for me, and to allow me to share photos. I use the tensorflow pre-trained example model for object classification to tag the images, it’s good enough.
For sharing other images, I’m building a custom imgur clone (GPLv3) https://git.kuschku.de/justJanne/imghost and https://git.kuschku.de/justJanne/imghost-frontend, example: https://i.k8r.eu/i/cXqmnQ
For most normal people, living without Google services may be complicated. But this is HN, we’re basically all software engineers capable of building our own solutions, and they don’t have to handle nearly as many edge cases. I don’t need to translate my image host into 108 languages, just english is fine (even if it’s not my native language). For people like us, it’s not that complicated to free ourselves of Google, and, in the long term, even self-host everything.