De-Googleify Internet

&gt; These services track us everywhere, while claiming to give us a better “user experience”.<p>That&#x27;s kind of the problem though; they usually _do_ offer a better user experience.<p>If we want users to start using open source software rather than walled garden solutions from large companies, we&#x27;re going to have to start building open source solutions which offer a comparable user experience to proprietary ones from large companies; a difficult task to say the least.

I like the idea of this project, but I have several nits&#x2F;concerns:<p>- De-Google-ify is a poor way of marketing these ideas. Your average web user <i>loves</i> Google because they are trendy and make everything so convenient.<p>- The site enumerates the pitfalls of cloud-hosted solutions and then proceeds to link to their own cloud-hosted solutions with no explanation of why they&#x27;re any safer, better, etc.<p>And not limited to this page, but I really wish in general there was a better way to convey the point of free software than the word &quot;free.&quot; If every single person immediately misunderstands what you mean, you&#x27;ve already lost.

It&#x27;s unlikely to happen as the vast majority of the public <i>simply does not care</i>. There is a deep technological disconnect.<p>The only way to de-google-ify is to bring about mesh network that runs on our mobile devices or volunteer run nodes. Maybe you need to take the Skytrain to a remote part of the city to access specific information because there are no nodes there yet.<p>The centralized infrastructure created between telecom companies which inevitably under the control of you know who makes it very difficult to be truly decentralized and free ourselves from corporations that provide a better user experience. It&#x27;s tougher to do on a decentralized platform but I fear that it will do little to sway herd behavior-vast majority of the population are clueless about the underlying technology and can&#x27;t be bothered. That might change in the future but for now, it&#x27;s the people who are unwilling to make a change, especially outside of HN and tech circles that is the big challenge.<p>A bigger campaign that really sells the value of de-google-ify is going to take lot of resources and earn the ire of Google who is unlikely to support their own demise.

This is just a lame advertisement attempt, and it&#x27;s not even decentralized, the advertiser controls all the published alternatives and links thereof<p>I&#x27;ll stick linking people to <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;alternativeto.net" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;alternativeto.net</a> - thank you very much

Just talking about search alternative; DuckDuckGo is my default search engine for over 2 years. It&#x27;s incredibly good, the only caveat is you need to re-learn how to search. The same way you &quot;changed yourself&quot; initially for google.

It&#x27;s unfortunate that it comes down to this but... maybe people will use an alternative to Google when it stops looking like this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;framadate.org&#x2F;images&#x2F;date.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;framadate.org&#x2F;images&#x2F;date.png</a><p>Unfortunately for these projects, user experience is pretty much everything. Yes people care about privacy, but obviously not enough to have to use lesser products.

&gt; The increasingly centralized online services provided by sprawling giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft (GAFAM) pose a threat to our digital lives.<p>Curious that they don&#x27;t talk about browsers. Your browser sees everything and knows everything it wants to know about your online life, it&#x27;s arguably the most sensitive piece of the puzzle. All major browsers except Firefox are owned by &quot;GAFAM.&quot;

The arguments feel disingenuous. A start-up is much less likely able to fight a subpoena for user data. A start-up is much more likely to disappear. The only real case I see is an argument against ads, though I don&#x27;t see any disclaimer that the service will then need to be a paid service.<p>Disclaimer: I work at a big company. I also worked at a small start-up in the past.

Their alternative services appear to mostly be existing FOSS projects, re-branded...<p>Normally that would trouble me, but in this context... maybe a great idea! The uninitiated might have less trouble adopting &quot;the frama suite&quot; vs a dozen separate apps...<p>Granted, the GNU ecosystem should already provide that, but of course there are lots of good FOSS apps that don&#x27;t and won&#x27;t fly the GNU banner...

I haven&#x27;t really looked at what this start up is offering, but I want to point out that you can delete your user history, disable personalized advertising and disable tracking by Google by going to myactivity.google.com. I would encourage everyone who cares about this issue to do that. The only disadvantage that I have seen is that the maps app does not autocomplete past queries anymore. I would also recommend you install browser plugins that prevent tracking by other companies.<p>A point I also wanted to make is that contrary to popular opinion Google&#x27;s business model is not build on collecting user data. Google actually makes most of it&#x27;s money on search ads. These don&#x27;t really require a lot of information about the user since advertisers are advertising to a specific query.<p>Disclaimer: I work at Google. Opinions are my own and not that of my employer.

I used to think of Google as the nemesis of the open web, out of an instinct against monopolies and for the little guy. Now I&#x27;m thinking Facebook and others are much worse monopolies (though I always wonder who&#x27;s using Facebook? Certainly not anyone I know below the age of 30).<p>Fb hasn&#x27;t a reciprocal relationship with the web in the sense that it takes content from the web but doesn&#x27;t give back. Best thing about Fb is that it&#x27;s a good filter for people I choose not to care about, was what I was thinking. But now I believe the kind of communication going on in Fb is extremely detrimental, dangerous even, to an open society&#x2F;democracy, because people with opposing views don&#x27;t talk to each other but rather prefer to talk themselves into rage with like-minded people, and get fueled with fake news.<p>Needless to say, worse things happen in autocratic states.<p>It&#x27;s only in Google&#x27;s best interest the web doesn&#x27;t become a scripted ghost town anymore than it already is. Therefore I don&#x27;t understand what they want to accomplish with AMP.<p>I used to think that p2p is the future of the web, but eg. zeronet&#x2F;ipfs don&#x27;t help one bit with the above problems. Also, I don&#x27;t want to cede the web; it was created by a whole generation of liberal-minded people.<p>Google should leverage their power for something big to counter web balkanization and echo chambers.

I love the reasons for doing something like this, and I&#x27;m personally really glad that people are investing time in trying to solve this problem.<p>That said, I think that one of the big mistakes that these initiatives make is trying to solve <i></i>all<i></i> of the problems that Google solves, under one roof. It&#x27;s impossible. The only way Google is able to manage it is that they are an absolutely <i></i>huge<i></i> software organization. No free, or even smaller-but-still-not-open-source, alternative is going to be able to match the sheer number of services.<p>But I also don&#x27;t think they have to. Instead it should be tackled in a decentralized way, which is much easier—one company or organization focusing on beating Google (or whichever monopoly) at exactly one of their products, by offering a better experience, or an equivalent experience with more freedom.<p>It makes me wonder whether a viable alternative approach as a consumer might be to use &quot;best in class, but not necessarily FOSS&quot; solutions from <i>many</i> different providers. For example, you could use...<p>- DuckDuckGo for search, an easy enough switch.<p>- Fastmail for email, which is very similar and an easy enough switch as well.<p>- Dropbox Paper for documents and notes, which is arguably a better, simple experience for most peoples&#x27;s simple use cases.<p>- Microsoft Office365 for spreadsheets, since it&#x27;s very hard for FOSS alternatives to be good <i>and</i> interoperable.<p>- Facebook for social messaging and events.<p>- Spotify for music.<p>- etc.<p>You end up with lots of different closed-source, for-profit companies in the list, but none of your data is concentrated in any one large player. At most you&#x27;d have to &quot;rebalance&quot; your portfolio when big acquisitions or shutdowns occur.<p>I&#x27;d be curious: If anyone is much more aware of privacy issues , could you weigh in on whether this approach would help? It might not help with government-actor spying, but it might help with lots of the other monopolistic issues?

Worth an upvote for the Asterix reference alone.<p>For me it&#x27;s mostly the smartphone which is difficult to unlock. I use Ubuntu on my laptop, run my own web&#x2F;mail&#x2F;irc&#x2F;etc servers, flashed all routers with OpenWRT... and it all made my experience better but Android with a Google Apps account is hard to beat. Say what you will about tracking and spying but it delivers.<p>Using FLOSS tools I can compete with Microsoft or TP-Link, not Google though.

Once again showing that Google is many orders of magnitude above companies like twitter, aol and facebook in terms of reach, revenue, influence, data and more importantly, algorithmic AI. Just take a look at the top 10 sites and apps on the net, most are controlled by Google, not twitter, aol or the next aol, facebook.

Well Google made a lot of money from ads. They invested heavily in infrastructure, engineers and buying whatever could enhance their reach. Android, Google docs, YouTube, Adclick. All insanely valuable acquisitions. Can&#x27;t say the same about other big tech companies.<p>It&#x27;s a great time to be Google

I&#x27;m as much a google&#x2F;fb&#x2F;microsoft &quot;hater&quot; as anybody. I waste countless hours trying to get a linux based workflow that doesn&#x27;t create huge conflicts with getting my real work done (everyone else at work is on Windows). But despite my idealism, the pragmatic truth in my opinion is that commercial companies offer a product that to the completely none technical user, is FAR better than any &quot;free as in freedom&quot; product. Even looking at the link provided here, I clicked on it and immediately my reaction was &quot;oh another freetard website.&quot; Until this kind of stuff has state of the art websites and user friendliness, it won&#x27;t catch on with people who struggle to turn on a computer. And that happens to be the majority of people. Diaspora? My aunts and uncles would probably think they logged into the dark web when visiting that site (except they don&#x27;t know what the dark web is).

I wish them good luck. I do use Google services and devices (written on a Pixel XL, and I use all the track my movements and usage options) because their AI suggestions and integrated features do make my life a tad easisr, but alternatives, especially open ones are never a bad thing.

It&#x27;s quite possible to break the Internet by blanket-blocking core Google IPs[1]. I tried blocking these in my firewall and my surfing sessions became really slow. I would much prefer things like uBlock which do it at the browser level and it doesn&#x27;t cause a lag.<p><pre><code> 74.14.192.0&#x2F;18 216.58.192.0&#x2F;19 216.239.32.0&#x2F;19 64.233.160.0&#x2F;19 66.249.80.0&#x2F;20 72.14.192.0&#x2F;18 209.85.128.0&#x2F;17 66.102.0.0&#x2F;20 74.125.0.0&#x2F;16 64.18.0.0&#x2F;20 207.126.144.0&#x2F;20 173.194.0.0&#x2F;16 </code></pre> This is usually because if you&#x27;re resolving domains to 0.0.0.0 or 127.0.0.1 in hosts then there is an inbuilt timeout as localhost is typically not running any services.<p>Best to make localhost run a service. A personal thing I use is lighthttpd[2] which ensures such a lag is vanished<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;int64ago&#x2F;1d72c80e8082b78777c9" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;int64ago&#x2F;1d72c80e8082b78777c9</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lighttpd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Lighttpd</a>

Not to get too political, but I find the idea that the internet is better being decentralized and non-corporate to be the new Libertarianism. Sure, these ideas sound nice, just like how &quot;small government&quot; and &quot;free market&quot;, but how well do they work in practice on a large scale? Don&#x27;t get me wrong, I&#x27;m not necessarily against such concepts as ideals, but in the end they are hard to implement in their pure form as the entire system gets larger and they aren&#x27;t without consequence. An internet not dominated by Google, Facebook, Reddit, Amazon, etc., sounds great because, well, screw the man, man! Let&#x27;s go back to 1999(or better yet, the 80&#x27;s so we can connect to dial-up BBSes for free by routing through a bunch of local numbers, because, screw the man!). I know I&#x27;m hyperbolizing here a little bit, but it seems silly and pointless. The vast majority of users don&#x27;t want this.

I like that they took the illustration from Getafix and Asterix :-)<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.asterix.com&#x2F;the-a-to-z-of-asterix&#x2F;characters&#x2F;getafix.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.asterix.com&#x2F;the-a-to-z-of-asterix&#x2F;characters&#x2F;geta...</a>

In the unlikely case anyone is wondering, &quot;publicity&quot; is an incorrect calque from French where it means &quot;advertising&quot;. So they are not saying that Google gets a lot of publicity, but that it pushes advertising.

Why? To completely remove anything from your life that happens to have Google as a part of it would be so inconvenient. Gmail is objectively an amazing email app on both desktop browser and mobile. No search engine can come close to Google. Lots of great apps like Google Docs, Calendar, and Translate exist to make your life easier for free. Google Maps is kinda annoying with Uber ads but its navigation and UI is so nice to use. It seems obtuse to just refuse to use a web service just because it happens to be made by Google.

Well, I&#x27;m sorry but it&#x27;s in french and I don&#x27;t speak it, and english is not my native either, but it&#x27;s rather established when comes to open software.

I recently reinstalled my system and didn&#x27;t immediately install any AdBlock software, so for the first time in many years, I actually saw ads (that I noticed). I was surprised how relevant the ads actually were. They very clearly had an idea about what I had been researching the last couple of days. I think this is probably a good thing, if ads are supposed to be a necessary evil.

Why doesn&#x27;t google offer a paid version which encrypts your data and takes all manors of privacy measures? I would go for that

Hint: you window needs to be over 1020px for the page to actually work. Otherwise the actual content you get when clicking the map is hidden <i></i>behind<i></i> the map (I almost dismissed this, but noticed it by coincidence).

See <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;rad_decentralization" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;rad_decentralization</a>

I think this is a good initiative. Pretty much like Wikipedia is to Mediawiki.<p>I hope they can implement single sign on so you can reuse your account across the different services.

What is this map? I tap minecraft, get a menu where I select minecraft again, and now there&#x27;s a circle on the map. Hurray?

The question is what I really gave up when signed in to Creative Cloud for example, instead of continuing using GIMP.

I think it will be all fun and games untill someone has to pay a price for all the tracking and then most will wisen up. Untill there is a personal price to pay no one really cares as the risks are theoritical.<p>Anyway since a significantly large number of software folks are actively working on creating and enabling these systems discussion in a software centric environment usually leads to handwaving and normalizing.

Nice Google+ link in the footer ;)

Oh dear...when will the left learn?<p>a goal is not a strategy, and as other posters have pointed out, these offerings are Not Very Good. Nor has Frama invested much in making them accessible. For example, I am a big consumer of news, so I clicked on FramaNews...only to be taken to a page entirely in French.<p>Now I happen to know french, and like it, but most people....don&#x27;t. And there wasn&#x27;t much on the page anyway other than an exhortation to use RSS. If you can&#x27;t be bothered to localize in even a few major languages, how am I supposed to be confident about the development of quality services? I agree wholeheartedly with the principle, but restricting myself to only using Free Software means I&#x27;m going to incur a major hit to my productivity, which is strategically stupid. I would be better off leveraging the capitalist establishment&#x27;s tools against them to provoke change than sitting around waiting for for free software tools to catch up.<p>It depresses me that a lot of free software advocates don&#x27;t seem to get or care how shitty their products are. I know, if you&#x27;ve spent ages working for nothing on a very complex software product it&#x27;s infuriating to have some jackass like me come along and sneer at it. But a lot of Free software products are, well, broken. I use LibreOffice but I hate it, because of things like selecting a single paragraph for a formatting change only to have the paragraph before or after included in the format change as well. I get that making a WYSIWYG word processor is a truly massive software development undertaking, but what&#x27;s the point if it doesn&#x27;t work properly for even the most basic tasks? It&#x27;s like a bicycle with the world&#x27;s most incredible carbon-fiber frame where one of the wheels consistently falls off. I don&#x27;t care how brilliantly engineered the thing is or how much work went into it or how great the sacrifices of the designers were; if the wheels fall off it&#x27;s a shitty bicycle.<p>I am left-wing. I&#x27;m very much in favor of cooperative ventures, Free culture, mutuality, privacy, and all the other things the Frama people care about. I want to live in essentially the same kind of world they want to live in. I want to support this project....but I&#x27;m not going to, because my resources are too limited and using (most of) the tools they recommend might make my life better in theory but is definitely going to make it worse in practice.<p>tl;dr ain&#x27;t nobody got time for that shit if it don&#x27;t work right.

Framatalk is surprisingly quite good and easy to use

We&#x27;re all economic and spiritual slaves now. Nothing will make a difference. All lights of hope will be stamped out when we get our one-world government. Have a great day!

Ironically, many of their pages are in French, which Chrome then calls on a Google service to translate to English.

Google is starting to become dangerous not just in terms of how much data it&#x27;s now collecting while killing privacy principles they used to abide by in their &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; days, but also because they now have a powerful lobbying machine, and that machine is slowly starting to turn against the &quot;people&quot;.<p>When they fought against SOPA, they were an ally of the people, and they were on the right side of history. Now, they were one of the supporters of the TPP, and largely a rival of the people in this fight and on the wrong side of history, and they lost.<p>Google needs to start being on the side of the people, and the right side of history, once again, before it permanently tarnishes its reputation.