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Comment by TheEnder8 | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, its not just Meta. It's anyone with a square inch of pixels that you can slap an ad on. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Meta gets a lot of flack, but it's easy to stop using Facebook. It's a lot harder to stop using Google or Amazon.

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> it's easy to stop using Facebook. It's a lot harder to stop using Google or Amazon.

Not in my country, where Facebook owns basically the entire messaging space through Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp. I have been able to switch my default search engine, email provider, mobile OS, office suite, etc. from Google no problem, but the network effect has been too strong to get most of my friends out of Meta's ad network. It doesn't help that most groups and basically all events are organized through there.

The only real messaging alternative with significant adoption at this point seems to be Telegram, which I cannot support for numerous reasons, primarily for the founder selling the entire user base of vkontakte to an authoritarian state.

Can you use signal?

They could, but its unlikely other people in their network will.

some of us do but the adoption is too low for any meaningful network effect

Not solution to the network problem, but you can bridge/puppet Whatsapp, Instagram, telegram, to matrix.org.

How can you bridge WhatsApp to matrix? Can you still send pictures?

https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp

Have a look at ROADMAP.md, but the short answer is yes.

As sibling said, using the mautrix bridges. I started with just bridge mode I think, and then switched to puppet mode, which seemed to integrate much better. Pictures and everything work fine.

However, you have to maintain a homeserver, which is not for everyone. If wouldn't have one already, I would just pay the element.io service which includes bridging (but I haven't tried it out).

Over the course of 5-6 years, I managed to move everyone that is important enough to me to Telegram. I don't care about privacy at all, I just couldn't stand the wrong abrasive spit-in-your-face whatsapp UX. It's funny how facebook was enshitified long before it was cool.

Now I don't have notifications enabled for Whatsapp and I rarely answer messages there. It makes me a freak by many standards but I'm free from enshitification in this regard!

One thing I have noticed is that local businesses don't have websites any more, they have Facebook pages instead. So if you want to find out about local events, Facebook is the only way.

As a Swede, the Amazon comment is funny.

They came here perhaps two years ago and everybody I know agrees they suck and can not compete with our local alternatives. They're not cheaper and the website is an utter mess of auto translations and dark patterns. Order flash storage and pray it's not counterfeit. We use Prisjakt[1] to compare prices and price history between shops.

About Google... Yes, YouTube is hard for me to avoid. I use StartPage for search (which is Google search proxy just like DDG is a Bing proxy). Switching to DDG wouldn't be that much of a sacrifice. I don't have a Google account and YT works well via RSS. FreshRSS is basically my YT frontend.

Facebook is the hardest to leave, without a doubt. Civil society isn't organized around any of Amazon's or Google's services. Parent group for school? Facebook. A group for your neighborhood? Facebook. Local trading of goods? Facebook marketplace. I've made the data takeout and have been hovering over that account deletion button I don't know how many times... But I don't follow through.

So, I respectfully don't agree. :)

[1] https://www.prisjakt.nu/produkt.php?p=6498581

It took 20+ years for Amazon to supplant the retail infrastructure in the US. They may just be getting started in Sweden.

Highly (and sadly) likely. They're obviously not in a hurry.

I'm reasonably sure that if you will block every single Amazon owned address at your entry firewall, a majority of the apps or sites will stop working for you. That's what is implied by saying that it is not possible to avoid Google, Amazon and either one of the MS or Apple.

I've never seen anything indicating that AWS does any level of user level tracking of people who access the instrastructure it sells on, have you?

I understand AWS is part of Amazon, but I think in the context of this discussion they're quite fairlt being treated as isolated companies.

It’s pretty easy to stop using Amazon.

It’s also pretty easy to stop using Google - Kagi and proton will get you 70% of the way there

Google is more than just a search engine for many people... Shared calendars, documents, maps, mail, mobile OS, browser, etc.

Kagi has a great browser, proton has mail and calendars (I mean everything has calendars, there isn’t really much lock in there), maps are (location dependent) very fungible.

The OS and documents are trickier as I’ve never used either but I did only say 70%. The thing I would find hardest would be converting sign in with google accounts

If the average person was so inclined, they could probably degoogle themselves 70% in one day, 90% in a month, and 98% in a year with very little cognitive load

The online shop or AWS?

More like impossible

If anyone is interested, there was an experiment about that. A week without either of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook. And last week without all 5. Very illuminating.

https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-l...

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