6d ago

It's time to boycott U.S. digital services! Here's a chart to help you do so:

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94 comments

A lot of these just don't work as an replacement.
- For example?
  
  The socials live from everyone being on them. Mail providers established a pseudo monopoly by distrusting unknown senders. Arte does not produce entertainment but edutainment. Office is dictated by your workplace. Twitch is barely viable as is for niche things like MTG. People gotta eat. You must use the search engine that enables you to be your most productive self in a work environment.(Desk jobs only, I guess, but I ain't got a real job where I don't know whether I see my home again when leaving for work)
  
  I think you're mixing up "they don't work as a replacement" with "they don't work as well as a replacement". I'm sure you know the difference because Lemmy doesn't have all the niche communities as Reddit so Lemmy isn't as good of a replacement, but it is a replacement because otherwise you wouldn't be here.
  
  Reddit don't work on mobile anymore. Lemmy is better for me.
  
  So you set individual preferences accepting certain pros and cons.
  The claim "doesn't work as a replacement" hence only is inside your criteria.
  Regarding the "social live", lets be real there is hardly anything social about Instagram aside from forwarding memes to your friends, which you can do in any messenger app. Regarding mail providers, the medium ones are not affected by the distrusting problems. Regarding office, you can switch for anything outside the office. I also have to use MS at work. At home i run LibreOffice and don't pay any more money to MS. Same for searches, where i definitely use search engines more at home than at work. But even at work you can get reliable results from other search engines.
  Lets be real, how often do your searches end up being a shortcut to the specific page on the same half a dozen websites? You are a programmer? Chance is most of your search results you click will be stackoverflow, w3school or similar. Most people will have Wikipedia articles among the top 5 they click on after searching. Just going to wikipedia directly is perfectly viable.
  
  Literally all of them, you're welcome!
  
  And how exactly is one email provider better than another?
  
  Probably for some people all of them are workable as replacements.
- I know why you're getting downvoted.
  But sorry people, Spotify is streets ahead of the others (IMO) as there is a far better choice of music. For me anyway, YMMV but I've given up with the others.
  Same with video streaming - you cannot deny that the quality (technical and production, if not content) of Apple TV surpasses the others. I gave up with Foundation and Silo (plots) but the quality was superb. For All Mankind is probably the best thing ever on TV after The Expanse.
  iCloud is just so polished and seamless. I gave up with Proton Drive as it was just too clunky and flaky. And that's after being a paid up Protoneer since almost day one. I still use Protonmail, Pass and VPN. Am just on a lower paid tier than I was before. Plus Vivaldi uses Proton for VPN.
  I'm all for buying European where possible, (German bier, French and Italian wine, CachyOS or Mint) but am not going to wear a hair shirt and accept second or third rate performance because the internet says 'America Bad!'
  
  am not going to wear a hair shirt
  For anybody like me who was entirely confused by that sentence:
  A hair shirt is a coarse garment intended to be worn next to the skin, keeping the wearer in a state of discomfort and constant awareness of the shirt's presence. Such garments were traditionally worn by some Christian religious orders, along with individuals who felt penitent about certain actions or their lifestyles. Their use is fairly limited in the modern era, but the term is often used metaphorically, which is why someone might refer to "wearing a hair shirt" when they perform some other act of self-imposed penitence.
  https://www.historicalindex.org/what-is-a-hair-shirt.htm
  
  I switched to Qobuz and I like it much more than I liked Spotify. Only real complaint is having to use their web client in Linux.
  I don't stream, but I'm thinking of learning how to use torrents. More ethical than Apple or Amazon.
  I had to fix some iCloud stuff for an ex, it was an absolute nightmare to deal with. I guess mileage varies. I couldn't be happier with Nextcloud.
  That said, I'm happy there are people who don't want to sacrifice comfort on here. That's a really good sign.
  
  'I switched to Qobuz and I like it much more than I liked Spotify.' The sound quality was the best of the lot but like I say, the choice just wasn't there.
  And I never had a problem with iCloud. I had a mac.com email address from when they were first avail. I hadn't use anything Mac since 2014 and when I picked up a used iPhone SE, everything was there when I logged in. iCloud is now avail online and all my old docs and pictures were there. All my iTunes music.
  Horses for course I suppose - Never thought Tim Cook would bend the knee though :-(
  
  I generally don't like joining sites that require more than a username, password, and possibly an email.

94 comments