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- cross-posted to:
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The bigger obstacle, of course, for Google is that Messages and RCS exists. I don’t think the company has ever laid out the difference between the two products or when you’d use one over the other.
And, yet again, we see the launch of another Google product that will shut it’s doors soon.
It’s unfortunate. I’m hesitant toward adopting any Google apps and services these days out of fear it’ll be shuttered or drastically changed. I miss having Google Photos and Drive linked up!
Yeah, their Google Photos free forever stunt put me off Google services. These days, I’ve taken my contact, and calendar syncing on a self-hosted Nextcloud instance. My notes have shifted from Google to Nextcloud Notes. For Photos, Nextcloud Photos is unfortunately not up to par, so I have a Photoprism instance set up to provide the same functionality, but under my control.
If at all possible, you should definitely give Nextcloud a try!
Do you happen to have any good solutions for off-site backups?
I haven’t set anything up yet myself. But, a Synology NAS makes it trivial for you to set up an offsite backup fairly easily.
I’d personally be hoping for something cloud-based but secure and affordable. I may be asking for too much! I currently get 5TB with Google.
Yep, you’re unlikely to get a better deal than what Google provides if you’re looking for cloud based.
But — “the cloud” is a vague term.
Let’s say you have a PC with a hard drive attached to it. If the PC has an Internet connection, you are technically able to access the files on that hard drive from anywhere in the world (provided you configure certain software to allow you to do so). At this point, you’re looking at your own “cloud”.
If you switch that PC and hard drive out for a Synology NAS with 2 or 3 hard drives, then you have a dedicated personal cloud.
Also, while it’s great that Google provides several TB worth of storage, there’s no way for us to know when that will go away. I’d rather have my most precious documents under my control - either backed up and archived on tapes or optical drives, or even digitally on flash drives.
I’m more thinking about off-site backups that I don’t have to manage. All of my family are out of town and not tech savvy, so even simple things can become tedious.
I do keep a 1:1 copy of everything from my Google Drive locally, I just like knowing that it wouldn’t be lost in a fire (along with being able to use Google Photos on-the-go). I was considering something like Backblaze but haven’t looked too much into it.
SyncThing can sync photos to anywhere you like. Set it up on a small VPC or whatever, mount Backblaze B2 as a fuse drive with s3fs, and put your syncthing dir in there. Easy offsite backups
Come now Google, fool me once etc…
…at least for another couple if months before it’s killed.
In Iran everybody is using Google Meet for video calls and everyone is wondering why it doesn’t have messaging support!
Is it particularly popular there? What do folks use for messaging?
Yes, it saw a surge in popularity after last year’s protests as the government blocked Whatsapp. Telegram had already been blocked. For messaging most people still use telegram with proxies and VPNs.
Do folks have access to Signal? It’s too bad it doesn’t support E2E SMS encryption anymore like it did as TextSecure. I think there are forks though.
Nobody uses it. It’s completely blocked and has much less features compared to Telegram.
Interesting. Thanks for the insight!
Of course!
Google should just make a web app for Messages and integrate meet for video calls. Leave Chat as a enterprise thing/Slack competitor and focus on Messages as the family + friends app.
I use meet for video chats with friends but it’s so annoying having to always create a room and then send the invite link.
How long until it’s rebranded youtube chat?
Nice try! 😂
They’ve thrown so much advocacy capital into the wind that at this point they need to offer something more than - hey look, there’s a product you can use.
I recently discovered that Google Meet allows you to sync-play YouTube videos with anyone on Android as long as the one who starts the sharing session has YouTube Premium. That got me thinking though… Just how much effort has Google put into features that I don’t think anybody knows about?
It’s funny to think that Google Hangouts had this feature a while back. It’s more than just putting effort into features; it’s also implementing similar features into multiple apps at different points in time.
Yeah, it’s super weird. And it’s not even like they’re reusing code or anything. The Hangouts version was basically embedded YouTube like we see in Discord but the current Meets implementation is within the YouTube app, which is really neat but again, why don’t more people know about it?
Still lacks a ton of features other messengers, like Telegram, have. Editing and deleting messages is nice to have, but at this point its kind of a minimum viable product
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