I really miss “Don’t Be Evil.”
I still use some of their original services, but I’ve become wary of trusting anything they brought online after about 2010.
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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Don't worry, they'll probably be sunsetting gmail in 2025
I still mourn Inbox, it was the best email experience I’ve ever had.
inbox was actually the best web based email frontend I've ever used, I miss it greatly, I've been using thunderbird since but it's just not the same
Doubt it, it’s one of their biggest data mining operations.
I can see them making it suck, though.
Please be a joke... I'm unfortunately pretty deep in my current gmail with all kinds of medical, legal, and financial offices it would be a mess for me to lose it
Move.
Now.
Seriously why now.
Better to do now than (most likely) never.
The sooner the better and now new cases are sent to the old email.
If you get your own domain ypu can choose whatever email peovider you want.
Hell. Host it at home.
So that's the plan and I'm not a stranger to doing basic server stuff. For me personally right now though it just isn't feasible. I'm not in a space where I can handle extra overhead like that and I'm entrenched in a lot of important communications through my old email that need as little disruption as possible. In about a year I think things will have cooled down enough for me to switch
Same as the other response said, but at least make a backup.
Also, I wouldn't store all that private information at an ad tech company.
That's a good point about backups! Doing that now
They sunset “Don’t Be Evil” a while ago.
"Don't be evil" isn't meaning that Google won't be evil, it is a threat to the user. "Be good and obedient, don't block ads and trackers, it's healthier for you"
I've learned the hard way to never use a new Google product, no matter how good they make it look.
When they killed Google Reader it was rough, and I only recently started getting back into rss feeds after setting up a self-hosted FreshRSS instance. After spending over a year convincing most of my extended family members to switch to Allo from their default SMS app for texting, it was a real gut punch when Google rugpulled it within several months of them really getting into it. They tried really hard to get me off Hangouts into Duo for calling, but I resisted all the way until they killed Hangouts too. Play Music was an excellent streaming service with a good library and I was happy subscriber. They also spoiled me with the "Free Song of the Day/Week" promos. The YouTube Music app to this day doesn't have half the features Play Music app used to have. The Stadia fiasco wasn't too bad because I got full refunds for all the controllers and games I bought on it.
It's no longer a mystery which services they want to ditch. Basically anything that doesn't make them a ton of money directly with paid subscriptions will be on the chopping block sooner or later. Even the ad-supported stuff is there only to annoy us into the paid tiers. I weep for the time they will eventually kill off Google Voice for good, or enshittify the free tiers of things like Photos, Gmail, Android, Classroom, Calendar, etc.
For me personally though, the biggest punch in the gut was when they killed Cloud Print in the middle of the fucking pandemic lockdowns, when my kids who were both doing school remotely needed to print a metric shit-ton of stuff. Worst of all, there was no warning about this, just a blurb on the cloud print site that nobody ever visited after the initial printer setup.
This latest "fuck you" was the last straw for me to begin degoogling my life. They made the web hosting decision easy for me when they sold Google Domains to Squarespace. My photos are now backed up to a self-hosted Synology Moments instead of Google Photos. I threw away the OnHub and replaced it with TP-Link Omada access points with a self-hosted Omada Software Controller. When they killed both Duo and Hangouts, I finally set up a self-hosted Jitsi server for video calling. I'm slowly replacing the digital content that I've bought over the years on their various services (e.g. Play Books, Play Music) with "archived" (wink-wink) DRM-free versions that I self-host (Readarr/AudioAnchor, Navidrome/DSub). The only three of their services that I can't seem to kick are Gmail, YouTube, and Android. Email will happen eventually, for my phone GrapheneOS sounds better and better every day, but nothing can beat the content library they've built up on YT.
YouTube will most likely remain king. Simply don’t get the videos on Vimeo or Dailymotion.
Used to be all over Google products but got my soul back and sold it to Apple instead. All the big corps are the same in the end, I think.
I had Windows Phone, BlackBerry 10, CyanogenOS, Jolla Sailfish and was waiting on Firefox os and Ubuntu to be available in my country they never were. We are stuck with stripped back versions of Android and iOS.
@chahk Google Play Music is very missed as it made it so easy to upload one's music collection to the cloud. I've since switched to #Navidrome, though my set-up is not for the faint hearted, as as it runs on a Synology server behind a CGNAT, so I had to set up a tunnel using FRP to make it publicly accessible. Hosting the music in the cloud wouldn't be cheap
I run Navidrome in Docker on my UnRaid server and I access it via nginx reverse proxy.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/rY0WxgSXdEE?si=G_Jzga_jxc-zH6ST
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I logged into my Google domain account today needing to check something, apparently squarespace bought google domains and now my domain will be switched to them without my control or knowledge. Guess I won’t want to use Google in the future for that.
Technically you wouldn't be using Google for that either in the future no matter what.
This doesn't make much sense, Google Sites will still be available so why aren't they simply migrating those websites to the Google Sites platform? Oh wait, that one might be dead soon, they no longer own the domain domain registrar so... maybe that's their plan, they will kill the business websites and eventually Google Sites.