Google is excelling again - as the whole “uncensored” Big-Tech IT now.
The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding Proton Mail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because Proton Mail has long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.
Google has become an awful company. I’m in the process of degoogling but it’s not easy given all the monopolies they have created
My one holdover is YouTube. There’s just no good replacement for it.
Use them at no benefit to them. Obviously, don’t buy yt premium.
I use Grayjay. Get it from the grayjay website and sideload it instead of through the apk store. Updates come quicker. It gives you commercial free YouTube, pretty much all the premium features, and let’s you download vids.
I already use Tubular, and I have been using NewPipe (or the fork Tubular) since the very first alpha.
Grayjay doesn’t work well for me since I’m subscribed to over 1000 creators and they force rate limiting over 200, which makes it completely unusable for my usecase.
Wow. 1000? I subscribe to like 10. Lol
My grayjay hasn’t worked for a couple of weeks now, “block attempt detected” warning and then the video starts over.
I had a similar issue, but I google searched and found a setting I had to redo or change and it’s worked fine since then. Afraid I don’t remember what I had done. It was like a month ago and late, but it’s been problem free for me.
Use piped or invidious instead perhaps.
Alternately, disenshittify YouTube using addons like DeArrow, Sponsor Block and uBlock origin.
I already use those things. My main way of watching YT is with Tubular.
The problem is that there is one, centralized hosting provider with an all-powerful, non-customizable (by the user) recommendation algorithm. That algorithm, like it or not, dictates the type of content that is made on the platform. If there is content that Google doesn’t like, they can (and have) very easilly shadowban the content, meaning only people who specifically search for it will see it, if not remove it altogether.
I don’t see YT being replaced in that sense any time soon. Federated text and image content is really still in infancy, and video hosting at the size of YT is a tremendously more complex feat, requiring, at the absolute minimum: a metric crapton of bandwidth and storage.
For me, I just use invidious and similar for the foreseeable future, or peertube when there are things on it.
At the very least, not being signed in to YT and having only a local watch history and subscriptions (=not on a YT or Google account) does starve the algorithm a bit.
I think the best bet at federated video hosting is with something like IPFS or even bittorrent. If every client is also a host, that would greatly reduce the bandwidth needed for any one server.
I like Nebula so far, but most of the videos are also on YouTube. I signed up for a promo through a channel (I can provide some if you like), so I got it for essentially $2.50/month.
I also sub to a few channels on Odyssee, and a couple on Rumble. If you’re good at searching for stuff, PeerTube can also work, but I personally haven’t found anything I really like there.
Only about half of the channels I follow are on YouTube, so if I really needed to ditch it, I could.
Good on you because the goal of getting off of google is definitely good but…these names sound like things that a writer would come up with as fictional social media platforms on a comedy show.
Yeah, the names kind of suck, but so does YouTube. Nebula has a much better name IMO.
Nebula is awesome.
What about Rumble or Odysee?
Rumble is trash and should be avoided. It’s just right wing jerkoffs
It’s not so bad and you can follow some normal people or channels - there is whole spectrum of channels and the video upload is not bad and you can listen to videos in background but they don’t have any mobile app.
I looked up odysee as well, another right wing dumpster.
Rumble CEO was in the news for something recently. I’m feeling avoid-y of it at any rate because of the Qanuts and “Libertarians” on it.
Ironically, Odysee doesn’t have enough censorship for me. Like any fledgling community, the main inhabitants of any alternatives are people who aren’t welcomed on mainstream social media. And I don’t mean the modern “every person right of me is a Nazi”. I mean a lot videos have comments calling for killing all Jews, one of the top education videos on the front page is by an occultist about how the wrong witchcraft caused 9/11, another is how the vaccines are going to start killing babies, etc.
Technically, it’s fine, but who wants to post good videos or interact in a community of crazies?
This is actually pretty funny. I am glad I am staying away from Odysee.
In general, I am rather skeptical of “free speech absolutism” and what have you, comes off a little parochial to me.
Yeah it’s almost always a front for batshit right-wing nutjobbery.
Of course it’s the lemm.ee user that suggest the fashyist of all streaming sites.
Can we please defederate them now?
The real sane option would be nationalization of google under some international body, not breaking it up, or leaving it, and just waiting the market just centralizing itself around some other company that will repeat what google has become and done.
No, that’s an insane option. Look at how the government runs other services and ask yourself if you really want Google to be run that way:
Do you really think the government is capable of running something like Google if they can’t even keep up with tax returns?
No, nationalizing it would likely just make things worse, breaking them up makes a lot more sense.
Government should stick to things where it can actually make a difference a commercial company can’t, like welfare programs, policing, etc.
On today’s episode of “underfund government agencies so we can argue govt doesnt work and privatization is bae”
Are you suggesting that this time would be different? The reason things are inefficient and crappy isn’t particularly relevant, just that they are and adding to that mess isn’t going to suddenly make it better.
I said what I said. Properly fund shit and put people in charge that understand it instead of politically charged appointees.
Big tech has done nothing but hemmorage money and make everything worse, why are you celebrating them instead of calling it busted when they do it?
Big tech has been making money hand over fist, especially Google. If you want to know how Alphabet (Google’s parent) is doing financially, you can look at their financial statements, but basically they’re making tons of profit.
The thing that’s busted isn’t that they’re unable to turn a profit, but because they’re so obsessed with profit that they’re breaking anti-trust law. Breaking them up should help competitors and eliminate a lot of the issues that have been created due to their anti-competitive behavior. Nationalizing it would likely just result in the service sucking after a few years, and may encourage lawmakers to protect it from competitors. It’s a lot easier to break up a commercial company than a government agency.
Google has, Google isn’t the only tech company.
Google also wouldn’t survive being broken up. Their entire business model revolves around the strangleholds they have. Somebody would absolutely pick up the search product if it went under and I’d rather it be public than owned by another Musk who will just decide that only fox news and breitbart can be displayed on the first few pages.
Some things SHOULD be publicly owned, in everybody’s best interests.
Some things, sure, but I think that list of things is fairly small and completely unrelated to services Google provides. I don’t want government anywhere near something as important to free speech as search.
And I think Google would be just fine, they’d just have to adjust their business model a bit. That means they’d probably have to raise/introduce prices to certain services to make them viable. For example:
Each of Google’s businesses is absolutely viable on its own, but if they can’t be sold together, they’d have to adjust some prices down and other prices up, which is good for competition.
They need to be broken up. ESP YouTube should be its own service
Yes, but it still would be only a momentary stop AND it would create worse service, because many google products are uncompetitive in themselves and can only exist because google steals everybody’s data through these platforms and sells it to advertisers. Like how much does google pay for youtube servers to keep running and how much would it cost for the users for the same thing and it to not be part of google. Every google alternative would either have to be worse service or be subscription based. I know I’m a devils advocate here, but still.
YouTube is not competitive?
Not on it’s own, I recall. it carries it’s weight inside google’s ecosystem, but outside it, it wouldn’t make economic sense to keep that many servers streaming video all over the world with just add youtube internal add revenue and premium subscriptions. The data harvesting is a big part of it.
I don’t think you understand what a monopoly is and how operates lol
There is nice tutorial here - simple steps how to get rid of the Google on Android Phone: https://www.jumagazin.cz/How-to-protect-your-self-on-Internet-part-II_468.html
It is good. The problem I’m having is they still gobble tons of data from any Android device that hasn’t been rooted and locked down.
For example the Google Play store, the main source of apps for everyone, grabs what when and how of everything one touches in there, and they squirrel it away with all your other juicy information to craft the better advertising weapon.
Yes, F-droid, apkmirror, others. But the point is it’s not enough to just limit interactions with official Google apps, the platform itself has to be locked down via a custom rom (which is its own, different set of challenges).
Well… Tech nerds lead the charge on making Google who they, gonna need toead the charge on unwinding this clown as corporate regime.