Long time linux user and tinkerer. Currently working as a devops engineer. Very positive to the idea of decentralized internet platforms. :)
Kagi is really, really good.
Yeah I honestly liked this text too.
No it was part of the request actually :)
America is almost the last country in the world that doesn’t have free healthcare, except for Africa.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries-with-universal-healthcare
Nothing is free. How would they make money as a company to pay employees and pay hosting bills?
All these big tech companies are free exactly because they are preditory on users.
Pay for good email like Fastmail or Proton.
Cost of doing business.
Meta and Twitter are social media companies. They have access to peoples tweets. It’s similar to having access to these messages you and me are typing, except many people use their own names there.
It’s not too bad privacy wise, just social messages.
Google on the other hand has the private searches of billions of people. Everything you put into a search engine because you are worried, afraid, sick, or curious about something.
Google records all this private activity and saves it under your personal profile, and then uses cookies to track every web site you are visiting on the web (using not only Google search but Google analytics cookies that exists on almost every website).
They also combine this data with whatever you are doing on your android phone, or what places you go to using Google maps, or what video meetings you are having with Google meets, what emails you have in Google Mail, what video you watch on YouTube, what calendar events you are having with Google calendar… And so on.
Then they feed all this data into algorithms designed to figure out what you are likely to do next. They sell this data to advertisers so they can target you with ads. They also send this data to American agencies like nsa to be stored and analyzed.
There is a giant difference here between Google and the other companies you mentioned. Google is literally watching moments from people’s entire lives, while the others only see your social media messages.
This is why Google is completely absurdly in it’s own class of anti-privacy. No other company has this amount of data about people’s every moment awake.
Now they use their dominant position to try and take over the entire web, so it’s not possible to escape them anymore using a different browser, blocking cookies and tracking, or using another search engine.
If everyone is forced to use their browser, we have lost everything good about the web.
They should be treated like the cancer to a free web they really are.
Darth Vader wants to protect children… Right.
I haven’t done that but yes, it’s pretty much unheard of that the user can actually control what shows up in search if you come from Google-land.
The Fastmail calendar is pretty good. Just a random page about them: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/shared-calendars/
For a conversation to happen, there must be trust. I don’t think anyone trusts them, so there is no attempt at serious communication.
They should be treated with contempt.
Google, the Internet Government.
It’s not too hard. The most important things are web search and email. I still use Google Maps. But I don’t want my private emails and searches at a company who is user hostile and preditory.
Basically they have made themselves kings and everyone else are peasants. Now they are dividing the land between them.
It may be the last few years of the free web because of Google. Their goals are clear.
Please switch to Firefox, another search engine and another email provider…
More like organic user reviews I would say.
Ah yes.
I also worry a bit about all these email aliases I use now. They do tie me to fastmail for the future. And if they would disappear, it would be a pain to replace. But that’s life. Have to take some risks. :)
That’s an apples to oranges comparison. Proton is not a web search engine.
Edit: But for email, sure. :)
Yup try it and set as default in the browser. You will start to see a lot of sites that never showed up in google also. They have these “listacles” in search results where they group relevant sites into a small list, which makes it super simple to go to them for results.
If you want a sample search, try “best tv shows 2023” or something like that.
Micro$oft, as we used to say in the old times…