Not really. I was a kid in the 90s, and I was lucky enough to catch a few glimpses of a different Internet. The DIY web, home to nerds and tinkerers, and God knows I miss it. Nowadays it feels like it’s just a big store window. Advertising already turned it into, pardon my french, a steamin’ pile of shit, and it’s getting worse. Google of course isn’t the only responsible, but it has a huge role. And yes, I know I’m just being naive and basically just a grumpy (about to get) old man rambling about the good ol’ times.
same.
Privacy was the reason it started, but I was also constantly bothered by the growing annual profits they earned from people basically giving away access to their information and livelihoods for free. I realized how valuable our information is, and the only way to break this deepening centralization and control of it, was to take it all back. Self-hosting and supporting FOSS are my methods to regain control in this war. It has become a sort of holy war for me at this point. Lol
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Privacy is a concern but not the primary concern. Google is too big to be in your life. If you use Google it’s in everything. If Google ever kicks you out your life is going to be very difficult while you rebuild your entire digital profile. Google’s too much of a risk.
Not to mention Google is demonstrated they will kill services at the drop of a hat. So relying on them is asking for trouble.
Google heavily uses algorithms to identify accounts to delete or block or ban. And this goes back to if your entire digital life is tied to Google and they do block you, you have no recourse. Google doesn’t talk to humans for reconsideration. You’re just out of luck.
Google is too much of a risk for a stable life
Always make a new account for every website, never sign in via your Google account, Microsoft account, etc. It was a neat feature when it came out, but it’s just too much of a risk.
Privacy and debloating, mostly.
- Lack of privacy
- Arbitrary cancel culture with no recourse
- Corruption and bloating of open standards like web
- Non consensual logins (android, chrome)
- Sabotage of federated services (email, xmpp)
- Suggestion of new tracking methods (like FLoC) when old tracking methods (like 3rd party cookies) are phased out
- Centralization of information flow (eg: AMP)
- Bait and switch tactics (like YouTube ads)
- Support for horrible laws (like illegitimate DMCA strikes)
- Locking down devices (with remote attestation, safetynet api, etc)
- Geolocking apps unnecessarily
- Invasive use of credit card information to prove location (why not just use GPS or cell info?)
- Incompatibility with open standards to achieve user lockins (eg: IMAP, caldav, carddav)
- Riding the open source wave with projects that don’t behave like one (AOSP, chromium)
- Untrustworthiness when it comes to long term presence of services
Primarily. Secondarily, to avoid putting all my eggs in one basket. As in, not using one singular network of services, and instead spreading it out. Diversify yo services.
As a general rule, I also hate monopolies
For me, privacy on the Internet was something I wanted for a long time, but was too lazy to do. The decisive moment for me was the story with Reddit, at the same time YouTube goes against adblockers, Twitter goes down and Google develops technology to determine with which browser I visit websites.
Lemmy quickly intrigued me, and privacy is a big deal here. I don’t want my digital life to be controlled by mega-corporations, so I’m gradually getting out. I’m slowly working my way through https://www.privacyguides.org/ and https://www.privacytools.io/ and hope to be done by the end of the year.
So far I have managed to
- Set up Pihole
- Set up Bitwarden
- Set up New email address
- I am using SearXNG
- Librefox for PC and Icedraven for Android are downloaded and will be used soon.
Next phone will be a Pixel, so I can use GrapheneOS.
So to answer your question, yes mostly privacy.
Privacy is my biggest thing. But, no. Then there’s the whole “I don’t to put all my eggs in one basket” argument too. Last, but not least: my battery life is also much better when all of the invasive tracking is blocked :)
Especially when the person carrying the basket like to chuck eggs out of it at random. Never know when google will discontinue a service.
I agree with this. I actually feel that the way they have restricted certain advanced search strings on the search engine is the most criminal of all. To me, watering down search results on a product that was previously excellent, is manipulation and control of information and thus, restricts people actual life. They are an extremely sly company and the control goes all the way to the top.
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It was secondary to challenging big tech corporations and their abuses to the Global South.
I control the distribution of power in the tech world. I am God.
Primarily yes, however a few other reasons are that i like FOSS, see no advertising (thanks to controld dns), and it makes midrange phones run much better than they would with all that crap in the background.
It started as a privacy thing but as I dug deeper, I found that all of the foss alternatives I found were simply much better in terms of functionality & usability
