[yabai]

I have successfully left Google and Gmail. I began to worry about the amount of information Google had of mine (about 8gb worth of email). I now pay for email. I have thought about setting up a mail server - perhaps that will come in the future.

I have also installed tiny tiny rss (because I used Google Reader) on a server. I also installed Coppermine to host photos. So far, I am very pleased with my shift away from Google. I also try to use duckduckgo and scroogle as much as possible. I will say that I believe Google does have the best search engine. Google search has been the hardest habit to break. Perhaps there is another search engine that respects its users privacy?

I worry about OAuth. I think we should battle to end OAuth - forcing users to be part of a social network/service to use their service is a horrible practice.

[readme]

I run my own mailserver on a linode VPS. For my own personal use, it's extremely stable and hasn't been down once for the 4 months I've been using it. I've got fail2ban, logwatch, and logcheck set up to monitor security. The distro is ubuntu server. They have a great guide for setting up postfix and dovecot.

Remember, if you aren't paying, you're not a customer, you're the product.

[icebraining]

Remember, if you aren't paying, you're not a customer, you're the product.

I use Hacker News without (as far as I know) being their product.

I pay for Cable TV and yet I'm still their product.

It's not as clean-cut as that; you need to read the small letters and always use caution, paid service or not.

[davyjones]

> I use Hacker News without (as far as I know) being their product.

Your HN usernames are required on the YCombinator app forms. There is a good chance that they will go through your comment history to get a feel of your personality. I would think that this figures in their "buying" process (they are buying a part of your company after all). If you look at it like that, you are the product.

[thhaar]

More likely than that, for the average user, is the fact that every contribution to a free, search engine indexed content site is 'unpaid work' and your content becomes the product that brings in new visitors and interest who search for the startup/web terms we all use.

Of course if you support a site, you'll be happy to help promote it. But what happens when you change your opinion on a matter that becomes important/illegal in the public eye, without the option to remove your now-offending content? Or if you plain just want to stop supporting a site? If people are guarded when making comments because of this risk, is the free service improved or worsened?

Email, picture or opinion, make no bones about it - our content is always product in some way. Content lock-in should rarely be tolerated. I'm surprised it is here, TBH. I happen to greatly appreciate this community, but I in no way agreed to give ownership of my thoughts in return for the right to interact. I'd rather pay with a content export/removal option than hand over the sum total of what little wisdom I have.

[icebraining]

I find it interesting that the terms of use (licensing and all) are nowhere to be found. Barring implied licenses (I don't know if there is relevant case law), you could probably force them to remove all your comments with a simple DMCA takedown request, since you hold their copyright.

[readme]

In addition to what davyjones says, the users of news.yc are the generators of the content. We make submissions, we comment. In this sense, we are the human resources of news.ycombinator.com. Our output is the product, but we are working the fields for it.

[yabai]

Thanks for the encouragement!

Many are just coming to the realization that they are the product. Hopefully people will care and the established model will implode.

[icebraining]

There's more to OAuth than that, though, let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. Its original purpose - letting services access user accounts on other services without forcing the users to give out their password and complete control - still makes perfect sense and is often extremely useful.

Using OAuth as a authentication solution is the dangerous part; personally, I won't sign up for anything that doesn't provide either email/password or OpenID as an alternative, but I don't see what else can one do to "battle" that.

[nuttendorfer]

What email service do you use now?