Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by akudha 961 days ago
I’d add - pay for services when you can afford it. For example, encourage smaller search engines like Kagi. Maybe pay for email, instead of using gmail. Pay for smaller/local news orgs that do original and honest reporting. And so on. And donate to archive.org etc, even if it is only 5$

When we pay for services, we can fight spam/ad invested sites, at least to some extent
1 comments
snorremd 961 days ago
This is my approach. I've almost completely de-Googled my private life. For email I use Fastmail. I've migrated most my mail over there, but some remains on my old Google address. So many accounts to port.

For search I now mainly use Kagi. Sometimes I drop into Google if I can't find what I'm looking for on Kagi. The nice thing about Kagi is I can manually block or de-prioritize SEO spam domains so I get more relevant results. Takes a bit of time to build these lists, but it does work.

I use primarily Firefox and Safari as browsers. I also support Mozilla via my Pocket subscription.

Edit:

I also have my own website where I post content without any ads or tracking. The content is even licensed under a CC attribute and share-alike license so people can re-post and remix my content as long as they give proper attribution.

link
akudha 961 days ago
Would you recommend fastmail? I am shopping for email service
link
snorremd 960 days ago
Yes. I've used them for a few years now and never had any serious issues. Their delivery rate seems good, I don't get much spam, and so far as I know I have not missed legitimate emails.

They have a fast web client where you can perform actions on your entire inbox. So far as I remember gmail only allowed you to do actions on the current page of mails. If you don't want to use their official clients you can always connect via standard IMAP and SMTP.

Also they support plus-addressing like gmail, but also subdomain addressing. I.e. instead of name+alias@yourdomain.com you can use alias@name.yourdomain.com. You can also set up nice email filters quite easily, and their server supports the JMAP protocol [1], which they made. So if you want to interface with your mailbox programmatically they have a more modern protocol to use.

The years I've used them I only remember them having actual noticeable downtime once. Other than that rock solid. Their first line support isn't super technical, but I've only tried to contact them once.

Edit: Essentially if you want good olf-fashioned mail, Fastmail is about as good as it gets. It does not have the smart inbox concepts that Google Mail and Hey do. And not so much in terms of other fancy stuff either. But it makes up for it by using open protocols for mail, calendar, and contact lists. So no danger of lock-in.

[1] https://jmap.io/index.html

link