Ask Lemmy
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Lemmy seems to have a very strong voice for pushing people towards Linux.... But I don't hear nearly enough about ditching Google and other mega-corps. I started Degoogling long ago and have been really happy with the result. There are lots of alternatives and there's no reason to stick with Google the way people do. Your description of half-baked shitty products is their hallmark. Their bloody search doesn't even work well anymore and that's what the whole business got launched on.
Lemmy please strongly considering De-googling. It's quite easy for almost all services.
I just started trying to de-google and I'm having a really difficult time with the search engines. I switched to duckduckgo on recommendation and while it's nice not to have the AI response (that was my biggest bother), I'm having a really difficult time getting good results for local businesses and like even tv shows. I know a lot of it is that Google is spying on me so it'll usually know what I'm getting at even if my search wasn't the best, but I'm just not sure how I can improve my queries or what I'm doing wrong.
I use Brave search and that serves me well (although Lemmy really hates the founder of Brave and my comment is going to get a lot of downvotes). If you need to use google, then you can reduce the data gathering as much as possible by using startpage for google search results.
Degopgling isn't an "all-or-nothing" endeavour. Even if you start using google 20% less, then that's still progress and you can improve slowly over time.
As a teacher, I also strongly reccomend degoogling. Google flagrantly ignores FERPA. The private info of students is safer with Microsoft of all things, but traditional Windows laptop can't compete with the cheap-ass Chromebook which means schools are quickly switching to the Google ecosystem.
Holy, don't get me started on ChromeOS.
I have seen more guides for ditching Google on Lemmy in the past few months than I’ve seen in the past decade across all the internet. I guarantee you you can find hundreds of posts here with people detailing how to do it or their own experience doing so. The problem isn’t Lemmy, it’s the communities you are subscribed to.
Edit: I also think you’re underestimating how hard it can be, in particular Google calendar. So many other people use it it’s hard to leave it unless you have some pipeline to convert calendar shares to your new calendar system that also allows it to consistently update. That’s the one that I’ve found the hardest time dropping. Email and gdrive were relatively easy once i sat down and did it.
Google maps is also tricky. I like organic maps but it is not nearly as robust and Apple/Waze are lateral moves