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Comment by intrasight | Hacker News Reader

I agree on Google and Apple being irreplaceable. But Facebook is easy to leave.

In many countries Meta platforms—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApps—are primary means of communication. If you want to find interesting events happening this weekend, you need to be on Facebook. In this regard, Google and Apple are much easier to leave because they offer personalised services, and you can always move your email and photos elsewhere. But you cannot move other people from Facebook or Instagram.

It’s not that easy to leave Google or Apple. As an example I wanted to leave iCloud and stop paying storage tax for Apple. But they have made it almost impossible to migrate the photos. There is no API to download the photos programmatically and the only way is to sync all the photos to MacBook and then move it. However, the photos are close to 1TB of storage and my MacBook doesn’t have enough storage to sync all those photos locally.

Same goes for Gmail. I have used my Gmail address for countless services and it’s almost part of my official identity. The benefits of moving away from Gmail doesn’t justify the effort I have to put in

> I have used my Gmail address for countless services and it’s almost part of my official identity.

This has been a topic for over a decade now, I think. People have been recommending getting your own domain. Best time to do that was ten years ago, and the second best is today.

For you, sure. But there are a lot of communities running entirely there. Our local farmer's market is preorder only, and is entirely run off Facebook. I would have to skip going there altogether.

And it's not viable to propose any alternative. There is no platform, closed or open, where there are enough people registered to be actually usable, and nobody will make a separate account for this.

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