Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)
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It may be the last few years of the free web because of Google. Their goals are clear.
Please switch to Firefox, another search engine and another email provider...
Any recommendations for free email providers?
I'm using proton. I like it a lot.
Register your own domain name with Gandi and they gift you free email with a choice of two webmail interfaces. It's really good, and owning the domain name enables moving to a different provider later if you wish.
Nothing is free. How would they make money as a company to pay employees and pay hosting bills?
All these big tech companies are free exactly because they are preditory on users.
Pay for good email like Fastmail or Proton.
I understand the sentiment, but email is a necessary part of modern life and not everyone has the luxury of paying for it.
A lot of things are necessary parts of modern live and you also have to pay for it, a mobile plan for your smartphone for example.
I had a smartphone but not a mobile plan for years. People can get very creative when times are tough.
Don't get me wrong, I think everybody should have the guarantee for social participation, I'm just saying that Email is no exception. If you did not have a mobile plan for whatever reason, you were just not participating.
Not really; I could do everything everyone else was doing; just not make phone calls or send sms texts. I used wifi to connect to the net and I could still make emergency calls. Im actually considering going back to that to save money, lol.
Nah then gmail is good enough.
I mean, Proton, which you just mentioned, also has a free tier, which is just as usable as Gmail is for 90% of people, myself included.
Proton's free tier is a step to right direction, and at least they don't run a huge advertisement company that could benefit from the free tier users' data. And if you pay for Proton Unlimited, you also get access to SimpleLogin's Premium tier which is nice. I just found this out when I finally bit the bullet and changed away from Gmail over to Proton. Now I don't have to expose my real email address to some random never-to-be-seen-again websites or campaigns if I don't want to.
If one has enough motivation, time and interest in purchasing their own domain, you can get one step forward with changing away from Gmail. Then you can pay something like 5€/month for Proton Mail Plus, use your own domain as your email address and if one day you find a better email provider, you could just change the MX records for that service and wouldn't have to go through all your accounts and update the new address to all the places.
I had pondered moving away from Gmail years and years ever since I found out Google doesn't have any real customer support and HN had stories where people had suddenly been locked out of their Google accounts because of some silly reason and couldn't get their accounts back without some inside connections. At one point most of my digital life was at the mercy of Google and losing access to my Gmail or Google Calendar or G Drive would have been a disaster. Reading all these web-DRM news reminded me that I should continue de-googlefying my life and finally made the change. Firefox has been my primary browser for years and I moved over to iPhone with my phone.