The De-Google Project | Hacker News Reader

The De-Google Project

tbray.org

47 pointsrapnie14 comments

A good Dropbox alternative is Peergos (founder here). Peergos is an E2EE P2P storage, sharing and application protocol. Fully open source, including the server, self-hostable, no VCs.

https://peergos.org

Love this! I'm the founder of Simple Analytics, a privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative.

@Tim, If interested (and reading this comment), I'm happy to set you up for your website. Its on me.

Just ping me here: dm.new/iron

> Criteria · To replace the things that I’m unhappy with, I’m looking for some combination of:

> Not VC-funded

It is really pleasant to remove things you care about from the idiotic and capricious control of the sort of people who aren't interested in making a good and sustainable business. Mastodon is annoying in many ways, but at least I don't have to worry about a lunatic buying it, or the founders selling it to Google and then Google turning it down once the acquisition clear. Using a WebDAV share is kind of annoying compared to Dropbox, but the IETF and whatever web browser I pick isn't going to try to train LLMs on my data or upsell me on Exclusive Business Features. Facebook can't buy my static photo hosting subdirectory and then mine my contacts to sell ads.

An open source music service is extremely unlikely. it costs millions to keep up with licenses alone.

Looking to deGoogle your website? Ditch Google Analytics and replace it with Wide Angle Analytics :)

So connectors having their contract end at the expected time is now a layoff?

Is there a De-Microsoft?

Linux, wine/proton.

It's good that people are doing this but this quote is an impediment: "The price is OK but it keeps going up, and so do our data storage requirements, what with all the cameras in the family. "

Most of the people on this forum can easily pay for Google storage which is de minimus for even heavy users. If we want to find alternatives and create an ecosystem of options for tech products we have to be willing to pay. If we don't pay then these alternative products will never get beyond the early adopter (us) phase.

Tim Bray does not emphasize or advocate an unwillingness to pay, just seeking reasonable price point vs. aspects that make him uncomfortable (the data harvesting). Which will differ for everyone depending on their financial means. If you can afford it then paying a bit more for a 'healthier' alternative is great, to support and stimulate the market for those alternatives.

I don't think "impediment" means what you think it means.

Regardless, Tim Bray is writing on his own personal blog, not on HN. His opinions are his own and he's welcome to them.

It's totally cool to just say that his assessment doesn't fit your circumstances without any blaming, shaming, or saying he's . . . using Google wrong(?).

Storage is far cheaper than most providers charge for it. Especially for things like photo libraries where the high res originals can probably be written to 1.1 hard drives in a basement somewhere (or maybe even tape) at a cost of <1 cent per GB/month.

However, the storage also pays for the engineering costs of building the product, and the economics of that tends to work out far better with billions of users than with thousands of users.

Why make such a blanket statement? The actual solution is selfhosting, short term for power users, long term everyone. You don't need to pay someone to host your services. In a world where Immich or OSM exists, why trumpet the idea of replacing Google with another company that can become user-hostile any time.

Self-hosting with the same availability/durability/security profile as Google would not be any cheaper (probably not more expensive either) - which is my point. His goal is to get off of Google and the other big tech providers for a multitude of (good) reasons but saving money is a red-herring that isn't just distracting but an unrealistic rationale that works against the other rationales.

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