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Comment by csense | Hacker News Reader

I have no gmail account, no Youtube account, and no Google Reader...Google's always been a little too big for me to want to trust more than I have to, so I've gotten by without accounts on their services...

And that means I get to feel smugly superior to everyone else in this discussion.

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And that also means that in other than a few of these instances, you constantly feel inferior to everyone else in the society, because of the things you are missing :).

The RSS area was pretty damns sparse outside of Reader. Were you just not using one?

For a while I was manually checking websites. I used RSSowl for a time, then Thunderbird.

RSS is a simple, open protocol (heck, they burn two out of three letters in their acronym to say it's "really simple") and there are plenty of alternatives. If they're really unsatisfactory it wouldn't be too hard to roll your own.

Do you use Youtube to watch videos? Google to search?

Also, what do you do for email, roll your own? Got any tutorials if so (I sorta want to start dropping Google myself - search and Youtube will be tough though)? Anything I found was a bit too complicated or I just didn't want to spend that much time on it.

You can, at least about Gmail. Especially since there is no way to export your Gmail data using Google Takeout.

That's what GMVault is for.

Or use something like Thunderbird to copy over your email to a new provider using IMAP.

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