[Gamers Nexus] "Google is Getting Worse," ft. Wendell of Level1 Techs

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

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
- 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.
  
  from what i see its a browser limitation rather than the site. dyor ofc
  
  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.
  
  lame, hopefully they fix that some time. otherwise their service is pretty great, and for most downloads that isnt an issue
  
  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.
  
  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
- You can use rclone to mount your mega drive like a regular folder. Works like a charm. It's a FLOSS command line utility
Why did you cancel Drive?
- To be fair I've had no issues, just trying to degoogle slowly

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

Permanently Deleted
- But I have nothing to hide!
  
  Why shouldN'T sundar the creep read my email and check my nudes?
  
  Ultimately, arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
  
  snowden
  
  Mullvad also put together this recently: https://mullvad.net/en/why-privacy-matters/nothing-to-hide
  
  Preach!
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.
- 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.
  
  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.

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

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.
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.
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.
- 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?
  
  Good chance you could at this point.
  
  Awesome. Thanks.

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

Proton drive is fantastic.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  Were those errors that the drive was full?
  
  Some of those errors were about the drive being full.
  
  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.
  
  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).
  
  I happily pay for my email service from Proton to compensate for all the data mining they AREN'T doing to me
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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).
  
  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.
  
  And that's exactly what that page discusses. It links three options you can try:
  
  Mountain Duck
  
  Expandrive
  
  Rclone - Github repo
  
  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.