I agree with that logic. But for me personally, I don’t feel “locked” into google. There are no contracts, no penalties for moving to some other service if I need. I never use customer support from any of these services because I find it’s easier to just look for the answers myself. I have no loyalty to any company, I simply use what best serves me at the time. All corps are interested in profit over people, so there’s really no company I have found to be fully ethical and transparent while offering a competing service that is as reliable.

I have the free 15 GB of cloud storage with them, but I don’t use it. I keep my data on my own cloud storage box. Yes, I have a gmail account, but I also have a proton.me account that I use more than gmail. Also, pretty much every big service out there is powered by Google and/or Amazon (see Twitter lol), so looking at the big picture, right now, we are dependent on Google in ways we are not even aware.

This is also why I am excited to see the shift to open source and self-hosting. I think a time is coming, too, where big companies are going to have to pay us for access to our data. I’ve made almost $200 just casually answering questions for the Google Rewards app. Sometimes it’s a dime, sometimes fifty cents, occasionally a question nets more. Those credits can be used to pay for any google services or purchases. I usually buy movies I can’t find on streaming services with my Google Rewards credits (my pirate days are long gone, it’s just not as convenient for me anymore and if I can’t watch it through a service or buy it, I just don’t need to watch it lol).

I really want to self-host a lemmy server sometime in the next year, I have a Core i5 desktop that’s not dead, just sits in a closet. My wish is to have all my personal social media self-hosted and I can choose who I want to federate with and who I don’t. But I’m not a pioneer. I’m waiting til this all settles a little to see if it’s worth the work.