• inspector@gadgetro.id
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    1 year ago

    The bigger obstacle, of course, for Google is that Messages and RCS exists. I don’t think the company has ever laid out the difference between the two products or when you’d use one over the other.

    And, yet again, we see the launch of another Google product that will shut it’s doors soon.

    • ijeff@lemdro.idOPM
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      1 year ago

      It’s unfortunate. I’m hesitant toward adopting any Google apps and services these days out of fear it’ll be shuttered or drastically changed. I miss having Google Photos and Drive linked up!

      • inspector@gadgetro.id
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, their Google Photos free forever stunt put me off Google services. These days, I’ve taken my contact, and calendar syncing on a self-hosted Nextcloud instance. My notes have shifted from Google to Nextcloud Notes. For Photos, Nextcloud Photos is unfortunately not up to par, so I have a Photoprism instance set up to provide the same functionality, but under my control.

        If at all possible, you should definitely give Nextcloud a try!

          • inspector@gadgetro.id
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            1 year ago

            I haven’t set anything up yet myself. But, a Synology NAS makes it trivial for you to set up an offsite backup fairly easily.

            • ijeff@lemdro.idOPM
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              1 year ago

              I’d personally be hoping for something cloud-based but secure and affordable. I may be asking for too much! I currently get 5TB with Google.

              • inspector@gadgetro.id
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                1 year ago

                Yep, you’re unlikely to get a better deal than what Google provides if you’re looking for cloud based.

                But — “the cloud” is a vague term.

                Let’s say you have a PC with a hard drive attached to it. If the PC has an Internet connection, you are technically able to access the files on that hard drive from anywhere in the world (provided you configure certain software to allow you to do so). At this point, you’re looking at your own “cloud”.

                If you switch that PC and hard drive out for a Synology NAS with 2 or 3 hard drives, then you have a dedicated personal cloud.

                Also, while it’s great that Google provides several TB worth of storage, there’s no way for us to know when that will go away. I’d rather have my most precious documents under my control - either backed up and archived on tapes or optical drives, or even digitally on flash drives.

                • ijeff@lemdro.idOPM
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                  1 year ago

                  I’m more thinking about off-site backups that I don’t have to manage. All of my family are out of town and not tech savvy, so even simple things can become tedious.

                  I do keep a 1:1 copy of everything from my Google Drive locally, I just like knowing that it wouldn’t be lost in a fire (along with being able to use Google Photos on-the-go). I was considering something like Backblaze but haven’t looked too much into it.

          • Paradox@lemdro.idM
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            1 year ago

            SyncThing can sync photos to anywhere you like. Set it up on a small VPC or whatever, mount Backblaze B2 as a fuse drive with s3fs, and put your syncthing dir in there. Easy offsite backups

  • lastweakness@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I recently discovered that Google Meet allows you to sync-play YouTube videos with anyone on Android as long as the one who starts the sharing session has YouTube Premium. That got me thinking though… Just how much effort has Google put into features that I don’t think anybody knows about?

    • menturi@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      It’s funny to think that Google Hangouts had this feature a while back. It’s more than just putting effort into features; it’s also implementing similar features into multiple apps at different points in time.

      • lastweakness@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Yeah, it’s super weird. And it’s not even like they’re reusing code or anything. The Hangouts version was basically embedded YouTube like we see in Discord but the current Meets implementation is within the YouTube app, which is really neat but again, why don’t more people know about it?

  • isdfoa@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Google should just make a web app for Messages and integrate meet for video calls. Leave Chat as a enterprise thing/Slack competitor and focus on Messages as the family + friends app.

    I use meet for video chats with friends but it’s so annoying having to always create a room and then send the invite link.

  • lightrush@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Nice try! 😂

    They’ve thrown so much advocacy capital into the wind that at this point they need to offer something more than - hey look, there’s a product you can use.