Google is excelling again - as the whole “uncensored” Big-Tech IT now.
The short summary is that for nearly a year, Google was hiding Proton Mail from search results for queries such as ‘secure email’ and ‘encrypted email’. This was highly suspicious because Proton Mail has long been the world’s largest encrypted email provider.
Google has become an awful company. I’m in the process of degoogling but it’s not easy given all the monopolies they have created
My one holdover is YouTube. There’s just no good replacement for it.
Use piped or invidious instead perhaps.
Alternately, disenshittify YouTube using addons like DeArrow, Sponsor Block and uBlock origin.
I already use those things. My main way of watching YT is with Tubular.
The problem is that there is one, centralized hosting provider with an all-powerful, non-customizable (by the user) recommendation algorithm. That algorithm, like it or not, dictates the type of content that is made on the platform. If there is content that Google doesn’t like, they can (and have) very easilly shadowban the content, meaning only people who specifically search for it will see it, if not remove it altogether.
I don’t see YT being replaced in that sense any time soon. Federated text and image content is really still in infancy, and video hosting at the size of YT is a tremendously more complex feat, requiring, at the absolute minimum: a metric crapton of bandwidth and storage.
For me, I just use invidious and similar for the foreseeable future, or peertube when there are things on it.
At the very least, not being signed in to YT and having only a local watch history and subscriptions (=not on a YT or Google account) does starve the algorithm a bit.
I think the best bet at federated video hosting is with something like IPFS or even bittorrent. If every client is also a host, that would greatly reduce the bandwidth needed for any one server.
It might starve the algorithm, but I still get good recommendations on Tubular for the most part, and I haven’t used a YT account ever since the first NewPipe alpha released.
I’m hoping storage will become cheap enough that something like PeerTube will be able to grow as much as Lemmy and Mastodon have over the past few years.
Is piped or invidious working for you?
The popular servers are down. Google put some kind of limit on them. I’m going to guess bandwidth limit.
I search “invidious instances” and pick some from the list - one of them will work.
I like Nebula so far, but most of the videos are also on YouTube. I signed up for a promo through a channel (I can provide some if you like), so I got it for essentially $2.50/month.
I also sub to a few channels on Odyssee, and a couple on Rumble. If you’re good at searching for stuff, PeerTube can also work, but I personally haven’t found anything I really like there.
Only about half of the channels I follow are on YouTube, so if I really needed to ditch it, I could.
I follow over 1000 creators on YouTube, many of them niche creators who don’t often upload content. There are a very small percentage who are on another platform.
The main app that I use (Tubular) also supports PeerTube, but PeerTube has a big issue when it comes to both content discovery and delivery. YouTube hosts not only the “full” quality video, but they also host many different versions of the same video at varying resolutions/bitrates. This is unfeasable for basically anyone but a big tech company. YouTube also has a very effective (albeit very flawed) recommendation algorithm that smaller platforms struggle to compete against.
I personally find the recommendation algorithm to be quite useless, since it seems to consistently recommend popular “engaging” videos, whereas my watch history is usually a bit more niche. Maybe it’s better for some people, but I’ve found myself getting better recs from places like Reddit/lemmy, YT comments, etc than the recommendation algorithm. It was so useless that I ended up turning off my viewing history, and I seem to now have better recommendations than before.
So at least for me, the platform itself isn’t particularly valuable to me, I care more about the creators themselves. I use Grayjay on my phone, which is nice because if a creator posts on multiple platforms, I can downrank YT so I’ll pull from those alternative platforms instead of YT. If I watch on YT itself, it’s usually because I’m looking for something specific, like music or information about a topic. The value of YT seems to largely be the sheer amount of content, not the actual features of the platform, so smaller platforms should be trying to get YT creators to also post on their platform. That way it’s easier to transition from YT to their platform, which is how I decided to sign up for Nebula (a handful of my favorite creators were on it, and I found a few new ones through their platform).
The recommendation algorithm (also using a third party app) recommends me tons of niche content. It’s how I found most of the creators that I follow.
Good on you because the goal of getting off of google is definitely good but…these names sound like things that a writer would come up with as fictional social media platforms on a comedy show.
Yeah, the names kind of suck, but so does YouTube. Nebula has a much better name IMO.
Nebula is awesome.
Fair. I just learned about and like PeerTube so far (activitypub federated video hosting), but it’s has even more infantile adoption than Lemmy does. I don’t know that anyone I follow on youtube posts there, and if they do I don’t know how to find them.
What about Rumble or Odysee?
Rumble is trash and should be avoided. It’s just right wing jerkoffs
It’s not so bad and you can follow some normal people or channels - there is whole spectrum of channels and the video upload is not bad and you can listen to videos in background but they don’t have any mobile app.
I looked up odysee as well, another right wing dumpster.
Rumble CEO was in the news for something recently. I’m feeling avoid-y of it at any rate because of the Qanuts and “Libertarians” on it.
Ironically, Odysee doesn’t have enough censorship for me. Like any fledgling community, the main inhabitants of any alternatives are people who aren’t welcomed on mainstream social media. And I don’t mean the modern “every person right of me is a Nazi”. I mean a lot videos have comments calling for killing all Jews, one of the top education videos on the front page is by an occultist about how the wrong witchcraft caused 9/11, another is how the vaccines are going to start killing babies, etc.
Technically, it’s fine, but who wants to post good videos or interact in a community of crazies?
This is actually pretty funny. I am glad I am staying away from Odysee.
In general, I am rather skeptical of “free speech absolutism” and what have you, comes off a little parochial to me.
Yeah it’s almost always a front for batshit right-wing nutjobbery.
Not in Retroshare or Freenet or I2P. They do have such people, of course.
My free speech absolutism would be in separating community moderation from actual physical instances.
Say, a P2P system where you subscribe to a community (somehow identified) and the “deleted” comments and “banned” users are that because of there being a “delete” record signed by that community.
With distributed storage, but storage a user contributes being used only by communities they subscribe to, so not like Freenet with every user probably storing one or two blocks of CP files.
EDIT: That would allow everyone to verify moderators’ honesty and fairness, which would be beneficial to moderators themselves, but at the same time in practice you’d have easy moderation.
Of course it’s the lemm.ee user that suggest the fashyist of all streaming sites.
Can we please defederate them now?
There is nice tutorial here - simple steps how to get rid of the Google on Android Phone: https://www.jumagazin.cz/How-to-protect-your-self-on-Internet-part-II_468.html
It is good. The problem I’m having is they still gobble tons of data from any Android device that hasn’t been rooted and locked down.
For example the Google Play store, the main source of apps for everyone, grabs what when and how of everything one touches in there, and they squirrel it away with all your other juicy information to craft the better advertising weapon.
Yes, F-droid, apkmirror, others. But the point is it’s not enough to just limit interactions with official Google apps, the platform itself has to be locked down via a custom rom (which is its own, different set of challenges).
Well… Tech nerds lead the charge on making Google who they, gonna need toead the charge on unwinding this clown as corporate regime.
The real sane option would be nationalization of google under some international body, not breaking it up, or leaving it, and just waiting the market just centralizing itself around some other company that will repeat what google has become and done.
They need to be broken up. ESP YouTube should be its own service
Yes, but it still would be only a momentary stop AND it would create worse service, because many google products are uncompetitive in themselves and can only exist because google steals everybody’s data through these platforms and sells it to advertisers. Like how much does google pay for youtube servers to keep running and how much would it cost for the users for the same thing and it to not be part of google. Every google alternative would either have to be worse service or be subscription based. I know I’m a devils advocate here, but still.
YouTube is not competitive?
Not on it’s own, I recall. it carries it’s weight inside google’s ecosystem, but outside it, it wouldn’t make economic sense to keep that many servers streaming video all over the world with just add youtube internal add revenue and premium subscriptions. The data harvesting is a big part of it.
I don’t think you understand what a monopoly is and how operates lol
How about some kind of federated alternative instead? But maybe with a better pricing model than what Lemmy does, where instances have 1% of their users tossing in a few bucks, and many smaller instances have the operators paying for most of it out of their own pocket. This would take a lot more bandwidth, storage, and CPU/GPU than a Lemmy instance would.
No, that’s an insane option. Look at how the government runs other services and ask yourself if you really want Google to be run that way:
Do you really think the government is capable of running something like Google if they can’t even keep up with tax returns?
No, nationalizing it would likely just make things worse, breaking them up makes a lot more sense.
Government should stick to things where it can actually make a difference a commercial company can’t, like welfare programs, policing, etc.
On today’s episode of “underfund government agencies so we can argue govt doesnt work and privatization is bae”
Are you suggesting that this time would be different? The reason things are inefficient and crappy isn’t particularly relevant, just that they are and adding to that mess isn’t going to suddenly make it better.
I said what I said. Properly fund shit and put people in charge that understand it instead of politically charged appointees.
Big tech has done nothing but hemmorage money and make everything worse, why are you celebrating them instead of calling it busted when they do it?
Big tech has been making money hand over fist, especially Google. If you want to know how Alphabet (Google’s parent) is doing financially, you can look at their financial statements, but basically they’re making tons of profit.
The thing that’s busted isn’t that they’re unable to turn a profit, but because they’re so obsessed with profit that they’re breaking anti-trust law. Breaking them up should help competitors and eliminate a lot of the issues that have been created due to their anti-competitive behavior. Nationalizing it would likely just result in the service sucking after a few years, and may encourage lawmakers to protect it from competitors. It’s a lot easier to break up a commercial company than a government agency.
Google has, Google isn’t the only tech company.
Google also wouldn’t survive being broken up. Their entire business model revolves around the strangleholds they have. Somebody would absolutely pick up the search product if it went under and I’d rather it be public than owned by another Musk who will just decide that only fox news and breitbart can be displayed on the first few pages.
Some things SHOULD be publicly owned, in everybody’s best interests.
Some things, sure, but I think that list of things is fairly small and completely unrelated to services Google provides. I don’t want government anywhere near something as important to free speech as search.
And I think Google would be just fine, they’d just have to adjust their business model a bit. That means they’d probably have to raise/introduce prices to certain services to make them viable. For example:
Each of Google’s businesses is absolutely viable on its own, but if they can’t be sold together, they’d have to adjust some prices down and other prices up, which is good for competition.
Google is basically a government in itself regarding it’s resources, GDP, personnel and the power that it wields, and they can do it just fine. Actually they are doing it so well and smoothly, that nobody notices being fucked by them. Your government just sucks in general, we know this. Instead of demanding less government, singing praises of private companies and people as fixes to everything, and then watching everybody getting railed by private interests twice as badly as before, you should instead demand better government.
Following any “let’s chop up google” replace it with another platform is just a game of fools whack-a-mole. No matter how small you would chop up google the same monopoly would still form under a different name, maybe in a little different configuration. We have been in this moment before in the past. You can’t kill monopolies, no matter the field because free markets internal logic will create monopolies no matter what you do and then it seizes to be a free market and you get all the anti-consumer, anti-competition, gatekeeping, general parasitic behavior that you got before. it’s not that google is run by bad people or is inherently evil now. it’s current tricks are what is required by the market and it’s investors because they want every single cent out of it’s customers. It’s that maximizing profit no matter the cost that is combined with cornering market on several sectors that is the real problem and creates that anti-user behaviors. You wouldn’t have that with a government institution.
With monopolies it’s either suffer or make them work for you. That is what a nationalization would be, since even a sham democratic control and following of social goals would be improvement on private interests doing the same and worse. If you are worried about governments spying on you, then don’t be. They already pay google to do that for them already. the real problem really is that companies like google and Microsoft are so big and influential that global politics would enter into play if US did anything to their pseudo independence from the state, no matter how benign their intentions.
Have we though?
If we look specifically at search, it went from MSN/AOL (i.e. captive to your browser or internet service) to Yahoo to Google, and each was a step up from the prior. The problem with Google is that they’ve snapped up enough marketshare in enough types of products that competitors can’t compete with the whole suite (i.e. search, email, browser, and ads). Breaking them up would enable other companies to succeed in one of those areas since it’s no longer all bundled together.
This has absolutely worked in the past. Look at the anti-trust lawsuit against Microsoft and look at browser marketshare, before the anti-trust suit, IE ate Netscape’s lunch, then a few years after the anti-trust suit, Firefox jumped to 30%-ish market share before Chrome started taking off. IE beat Netscape because of antitrust, then Firefox beat IE because of features, and Chrome beat Firefox and IE because of performance. That’s how the market should work. However, Chrome cemented its dominant position through bundling with other Google products and Chrome-only extensions (i.e. much the same strategy that IE had), so people get frustrated with non-Chrome browsers and use Chrome.
I disagree, both with the premise (that we have a free market) and the conclusion (that a free market results in monopolies). We have a lot of protections for large tech companies, and that promotes monopolies. For example:
A truly free market have a high likelihood of self-correcting once one group gets too influential. In the late 90s, it really looked like Yahoo was going to take over the world (everyone seemed to have a yahoo email address, used yahoo search, etc), and that existed until Google found a way to do search better, and bundled direct competitors to yahoo’s services. That is an example of the free market working as intended, Yahoo sat on its hands and was punished for it. These days, however, Google is sitting on its hands, yet it’s not getting punished for it because it has successfully locked in users. That tells me it’s not a free market, and if you look closely, there are a lot of anti-competitive practices.
I can find a lot of evidence where a dominant party sits on its hands and a competitor eats its lunch. For example, Intel kept its position early on through anti-competitive behavior (massive lawsuit w/ AMD, which AMD won), and AMD later ate its lunch with Ryzen because Intel stopped innovating. These days, ARM is threatening to take marketshare on laptops from both because neither has a particularly compelling mobile CPU. If Nvidia stops innovating, Intel and AMD are ready to eat its lunch on GPUs. Steam is encroaching on Switch’s dominance on handhelds (and has reinvigorated a whole PC handheld market), and I wouldn’t be surprised if they could make inroads into XBox and Playstation console dominance, just like how XBox essentially filled in where Dreamcast failed.
There are healthy, relatively free markets, and there are unhealthy, unfree markets. The government’s role should be to catch companies when they cheat to keep markets as free as possible.
Wouldn’t you? Government programs often lead to stagnation, as well as legal barriers to competition. Look at the train system in the US, it used to be a really healthy, private ecosystem, but that was destroyed when the government heavily subsidized road infrastructure, making road transit cheaper than rail transit (which is absolutely nuts to me). If the government wants to promote a service, it’ll subsidize it with income taxes so alternatives can’t realistically compete.
I don’t know what nationalizing Google would look like, but I expect to see some anti-competitive behavior from the government agency in control of it, and you can’t really sue the government for anti-trust.
Or the alternative: lower the barrier for others to compete. For example, to break a monopoly on ISPs, either strip out bureaucracy so competitors can come lay lines (only attracts big companies), or provide infrastructure for companies to provide service on (e.g. muni fiber). I wouldn’t want my city to be my ISP, but I’m happy with it owning the infra and private companies competing to win service contracts.
I don’t see how government getting involved in search, email, or hosting makes any sense though. If they do search, there are huge ethical concerns (esp. around elections and partisan searches). If they do email, it’s going to end up looking like TreasuryDirect or IRS.gov, as in incredibly dated and crappy to deal with. If they do hosting, they’ll sit on upgrades and you’ll be stuck on outdated hardware. That’s just how governments operate, they only update things if there’s enough political will to do so.
Government is most effective as a police to shut down bad behavior, it’s really ineffective at actually providing services IMO (look at wait times for simple things, like processing a passport). Governments should set and enforce the rules, and then let the market provide the services.
It never will. You libertarian types say that it will, but it never has and never will. First there are no mythical pure free market and also when you have a lot more capital, resources and bulk. They can comparatively throw endless amounts of money towards a problem and RnD. They can afford to fuck up and have a money buffer, they might just generally stagnate and be ok. When your potential challengers can only usually have one chance and, when they fail they will get bought out and usually by the same monopoly that they were trying to challenge and thus enforcing that monopoly with whatever innovation that the up with, or they just take the patent just so that nobody else gets it. And what has alphabet for example doing. it’s been shopping smaller tech and IT companies all around the world and it integrating them into itself.
how will you lower the capital cost that would be required to challenge google/alphabet? Servers, battalions of code monkeys and engineers and RnD don’t just drop from the sky for free you know. That is the biggest problem of challenging any monopoly, it’s just too damn expensive to try when it reaches a certain point. There comes a point when you can’t just anymore get into the market with two shovels and some elbow grease and you need massive loans for fleets of excavators and trained crews to run them just to be competitive. There is also the problem that at some point nobody will fund your venture to dethrone the market leader, because A) it’s expensive as fuck B) there is 1% chance that you will succeed and the investment will provide 100x return and 99% chance that failure awaits and the money will be lost. No sane bank or financier takes that bet and nobody does that kinda things for charity.
Again, your government just sucks. You draw the incorrect conclusion that therefore every government must suck as badly as yours.
I gave you examples where it has. Yahoo’s massive search lead was completely destroyed by Google, who offered a much better product at the time, and they even tried the “one-stop shop” thing that Google is known for today.
But that’s not what companies tend to do. Once companies get a commanding lead, they take their foot off the gas and try to rake in profits. That happened to Intel, and look where they’re at now. As long as there’s no anti-competitive behavior, the system will eventually correct itself, because the dominant company will take its foot off the gas. If it doesn’t, then it really doesn’t matter if they have a massive marketshare because the customer is happy (e.g. Valve), but that’s incredibly rare.
In a fair market, you won’t just have one challenger though, you’ll have tons. Investors love underdog success stories because going from nothing to significant market share makes a lot more money than maintaining a lead, so there will always be support for challengers to the status quo. Look at cars, Tesla ate everyone’s lunch on EVs to become the most valuable car company. People thought the car market was largely impossible to break into, yet Tesla was able to do it. Why? Lots of capital and a strong, new-ish tech (yes, EVs weren’t new, but fast EVs were).
Yeah, monopolies will try to buy their smaller competitors, and it’s on regulators to block those sales if they’re anti-competitive, and it’s also on those smaller competitors to say no because they believe in their product.
By separating the various components so they don’t have as much power.
Right now, a competitor can’t really win at search because it’s not the default everywhere, and Google has basically paid to be the default everywhere. So breaking that anti-competitive behavior is the first step. A company also can’t win at video because Google subsidizes YouTube with its profitable search business, so if that’s forced to be profitable on its own, it’ll have to raise prices, which creates an opportunity for a challenger to step in. For web browsers, Google basically has massive intertia, which it maintains by having Chrome be default on Android, and Chrome is the lynchpin to pretty much everything. The solution there is to force Android to be self-sufficient (i.e. provide it’s own, non-Chrome browser), and for Chromebooks to also be independently successful (i.e. separate it from the Google Search product).
If each of Google’s products had to be profitable on their own merits, competitors would have a realistic shot.
If you’ll look at the market though, there are competitors that are ready to start taking marketshare:
So if you break up Google, the market is ready for competition, they’re just being suppressed because of Google’s anti-competitive behavior.
That’s how business generally goes. The successful ones don’t attack the golden goose directly, but instead chip away at the edges. That’s what Proton, Kagi, etc are essentially doing, and AFAIK they are commercially successful, they just have a hard time competing with “free.”
I’m not talking about every government, I’m talking about this one specific government, because that’s the one that’s relevant in this discussion.
I do think that other governments also suck, they just suck differently. I just think the motivations for governments just don’t align properly for certain classes of services. But to make that case, I’d have to talk in the context of a specific government and a specific service, and in this case I’m talking about the US government and services Google provides.