This is just a vent. Disregard if not interested. Since I started my DeGoogle journey, I

  • switched to a more trustworthy VPN that I use more stringently than before;
  • deconvoluted personal and work accounts;
  • deleted third-party Google logins and set up email / PW logins instead for corporate sites that I do use; I also started using
  • NextTube;
  • Lemmy;
  • Matrix;
  • DuckDuckGo, Qwant;
  • LibreWolf, IronFox, Mullvad Browser;
  • more open source productivity programs, where work admins permit;
  • avoid AI use or use locally-hosted or responsibly managed AI where it actually gives me a productivity benefit.

The more I DeGoogle, the more the wonderful rainbow land that should be the internet just starts to feel like a deep dark forest where everything is purposefully designed to exploit the user or wall them off. It’s tiring. User name checks out, I guess. Thanks for listening to my rant, please go on with your -hopefully- wonderful days now.

  • MachineFab812@discuss.tchncs.de
    2·
    2 days ago

    I mean, if you’re that-into 78-year-olds, good luck with her … but yes, I was around and active on the internet back then too.

    I wasn’t speaking of the experiences of others. I have fonder memories of Compuserve, early Metasearch.com, askjeeves and even Yahoo or AoL, than google. Gmail’s “free” 15gb is what suckered me. Somewhere in the middle of it all Microsoft “partnered” with Bigfix and other scammers(which degraded first the scammers, as they no longer had to pretend or retain even a hint of some of the genuine products they had bought-out), and then Google “bought”(became) Doubleclick … and you already knew all that and the rest.