this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
333 points (94.6% liked)

Technology

60101 readers
2926 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] BroBot9000 159 points 6 months ago (8 children)

Getting worse is putting it lightly.

Get the fuck off Google services if you can. Highly recommend Proton mail and drive as a replacement.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Moved to Protonmail earlier this year, just cancelled my Drive sub and am looking at switching to Mega

[–] Nikki 7 points 6 months ago (2 children)

can vouch for mega, been using it for 8 years now with no real issues. only sticking point is file download limits with Firefox, and thats just because im too lazy to download the desktop app

[–] tibi 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I hate services that force you to download an app when the functionality could be provided in browser. Apps have a lot more permissions to access things that wouldn't be accessible in browser.

[–] Nikki 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

from what i see its a browser limitation rather than the site. dyor ofc

[–] A_Random_Idiot 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

its cause of the stupid way mega downloads file to your ram, and only when its fully downloaded does it get moved to the drive or something along those lines, its been a while since i've looked into it.

Its megas limitation by intentionally doing shit a stupid way then blaming the browser for it.

[–] Nikki 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

lame, hopefully they fix that some time. otherwise their service is pretty great, and for most downloads that isnt an issue

[–] A_Random_Idiot 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Like I said, its intentional. Nothing to fix because its doing exactly what they want. Cause they want you to install the app, which they have much greater control over and ability to harvest from.

[–] Nikki 1 points 6 months ago

chrome doesnt have this restriction is why i think its not as slimy as that, and why i don't have the app since i just paste the link into chrome lol

sounds more like they designed it around chrome and didnt take firefoxes differences into account, and have yet to fix it because in the grand scheme of things it's a small issue

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

You can use rclone to mount your mega drive like a regular folder. Works like a charm. It's a FLOSS command line utility

[–] asdfasdfasdf 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

To be fair I've had no issues, just trying to degoogle slowly

[–] Lost_My_Mind 11 points 6 months ago (2 children)

....tell me more of these proton mail services of which you speak!

[–] BroBot9000 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Been using their paid email, drive and vpn for the last couple of years and their service has been flawless in my experience. Great apps and never had an outage or issues once.

Free versions are available but the paid version is well worth it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I've been with them for a couple of years too and I use all their services (mail, calendar, drive, VPN, pass and simplelogin) but calling it flawless is a bit of an overstatement.

Their outside communication is nonexistent at best, development speed is unbearably slow and Linux support, the most privacy countious user-base?, is lacking a lot.

Hopefully in the next couple years they sinally manage to release contact sync and a Linux client for Drive.

[–] micka190 2 points 6 months ago

Their outside communication is nonexistent at best

Eh, they're decently active on Reddit, I guess. They send the occasional newsletter regarding new features if you don't unsubscribe (and they're pretty good at not spamming with those, imo).

development speed is unbearably slow

I see people say this all the time, and while feature updates are kind of slow, I'm also not lacking anything, personally. I would appreciate it if they smoothed-out SimpleLogin's extension, though. That thing is weirdly clunky to use.

Agree on the Linux bit, though. I'm surprised they haven't put more work into that.

Overall, I've been a happy customer for a few years, personally.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Is it still viable in 2024 to run a home email server? I used to have a personal Postfix box back in the day.

[–] univers3man 37 points 6 months ago

You'd have to be really committed. There's more admin work than you think to make sure you're not insecure or getting blocked.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago

I use a cheap VPS to host my email server. It's a bit easier than running it solely at home, but there's a lot of annoying work to "verify" yourself. Once you get your DNS records good, you shouldn't be blocked after that (unlike a home server). It only costs me $5/month plus the domain, which I think is money well spent. Doing the admin work to make sure I'm secure still needs to happen, but I don't mind that work and find it fun.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Gmail and other big providers tend to consider new domains to be spam until they've proven otherwise. Can't prove otherwise until you've been up and running for a while. Catch-22. The way out of that is to host with an existing provider for a few years.

Does it cut down on spam? Perhaps. Does it favor existing providers like Gmail? Yes, definitely.

Honestly, hosting email has long been difficult to setup, and all the more so if you don't want your box to be a spam host within three seconds of plugging it in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I've been hosting a personal domain with an established-but-not-large hosting provider for around 6 years, without any troubles sending or receiving mail from that domain (via the provider's servers, of course).

Does that mean my domain is now well established enough to take email hosting to my own server?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Good chance you could at this point.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Awesome. Thanks.

[–] KonalaKoala 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I would need to see some alternates for Google Drive in that case.

[–] BroBot9000 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] KonalaKoala 1 points 6 months ago (3 children)

I just signed up for that just to check it out and compare it, and it looks like upgrading the storage on it is more expensive than Google Drive.

[–] BroBot9000 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yeah but that’s expected. It’s difficult to compete as a smaller company compared to what Google can offer.

It’s the price of privacy and to be outside of the google ecosystem.

[–] KonalaKoala 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Apparently, doing a sync with it just on my documents and photos, it ended up filling up the Proton Drive and giving hundreds of errors on one of my Windows 10 computers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

I recently started using Tresorit, E2E encrypted cloud storage, owned by the swiss post, only downside I can find is price. I haven't used it long enough to really be able to recommend, but there aren't a ton of options out there.

[–] asdfasdfasdf 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Were those errors that the drive was full?

[–] KonalaKoala 1 points 6 months ago

Some of those errors were about the drive being full.

[–] justaderp 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

There's an incredible story behind it. But, the short form is that Proton is more expensive because they're not harvesting your private information. In a few months the law will prevent them from doing for as long as the core fiscal law and Proton exist (at least decades).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

I happily pay for my email service from Proton to compensate for all the data mining they AREN'T doing to me

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

If price is main concern, you still have options, but you'll need to be a lot more specific about what you need. For example:

  • direct Drive replacements - OneDrive and Amazon Drive
  • just file storage - DropBox, and MEGA
  • backups - NordLocker, Backblaze
  • hosted and self-hosted cloud platforms - OwnCloud and NextCloud, use Backblaze B2 for storage

I'm doing the last one. I have NextCloud installed on my custom NAS (just openSUSE Leap with some drives) and am working on configuring B2 as a backup service. It's more expensive than Drive, but it's also more versatile (streams movies to TV, use as Linux package cache for faster upgrades, etc).

Each of these are similar in price to Google Drive, but with a different feature set. Some are cheaper.

[–] KonalaKoala 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Sorry for not being more specific about what I need, I will explain it here.

With Google Drive, it gets assigned to a drive letter on my computer which is H: here and I'm not sure if any other Drive alternatives do that or not.

Right now, I currently pay $3 USD a month for 300 GBs of Google Drive space and they appear to go up with 5TBs for $25 USD a month and $10TBs for $50 USD a month.

I'm not interested in One Drive as that is Microsoft's Shit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Here are options for to mount Backblaze B2 as a drive. It's $6/TB/month, and I think they allow <1TB, so for 300GB you'd pay ~$2/month. So I think they're pretty competitive, but I'm not familiar with Google Drive's terms. They're certainly in the same ballpark, if not cheaper, but it depends on your egress and Google Drive's policies around that (how much you download from their service).

[–] KonalaKoala 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Well, for one thing, I would want to find out if there is a way to mount a remote drive service to a drive letter on a Windows machine like Google Drive so that I can have it as a backup option that would keep my stuff privacy, and not scraped by some AI LLM.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

And that's exactly what that page discusses. It links three options you can try:

The first two are paid, the last is FOSS, and it claims each can mount Backblaze B2 as a Windows drive. I haven't tried any of them, so YMMV.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Just signed up after they announced the non-profit and migrated all my mail. So far so good.

I wouldn't go from Google to another for-profit though. I know how it ends.

[–] Cyberflunk 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

But what if Alphabet buys Proton!?

[–] recklessengagement 9 points 6 months ago

They went non-profit recently to specifically prevent this from happening.

https://proton.me/blog/proton-non-profit-foundation

[–] [email protected] -2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

duckduckgo and yandex.

restricting your search to r*ddit to filter out blogspam.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 6 months ago

Block all their servers on your network, it’s really not hard to go Google-free.