Let’s imagine we live in a world the American government is not the American government so you can trust what American companies say when they talk about protecting your privacy and so on…
Alas we don’t live in such a world and I think, as much as possible, it’s safer to not trust much of the US apps and services. Like I said, as much as possible I want to use made in the EU software and services, or EU-made forks of those. But it’s not always doable.
For example, I use the Vivaldi Browser (Chromium) and Waterfox (Firefox fork). I use LibreOffice for writing. I have multiple emails, all EU-based (Proton, Infomaniak + my French-hosted own web domain/email). I don’t use AI, but if I did I would use the French Mistral (is that its name? Not sure about that) and maybe give Proton a try too. I use one cloud from Swiss and another from Germany (this one E2EE).
Search is where I’m stuck. I use the French Qwant but I also use (and pay good money) to use the US-based Kagi search engine. To me, Kagi is unrivaled and offers a mix of features (great search results and many cool options to filter said results), ease of noise-removal (no ads, no seo and the ability to remove specific domains from search results,…) and they promise to not track us at all. Alas, since it’s a US company and since they can’t rise above US law, I simply consider that whatever I search using them is compromised.
I remember using DuckDuckGo a few years ago and I quite liked it. But if I have to use a US search engine that must be Kagi. It’s really good and, nope, I’m not sponsored to say that… As a matter of fact, being a paid-user, it is I that is sponsoring them ;)
Search is where I’m stuck
Run/self host Searxng on a cheapass VPS. I picked up one for testing before production a long time ago, runs me $25/year. Spin up Docker, Portainer, and Searxng in an hour or less. Add your Searxng instance to Firefox search engine and make it default. Secure the VPS with UFW, Fail2Ban, and if you’re the only user, make use of the host.allow and host.deny files to pretty much weed out the baddies. Jack’s a doughnut, Bob’s your uncle.
I don’t hear a lot of noise about self hosting here in the Privacy chan, but if you’re looking to cut out corporate services from your repertoire, self hosting is a great way.
Thx. It is an idea I considered a while ago, like selfhosting as much things as I can, but looking at it and reading the various docs/help I realized it was way above my skills, at least that I wouldn’t feel confident I’m doing it right/safely. For context, I’m well into 50s and even though I run Linux i’m not that much of a geek (I’m already very happy I can blog using Markdown + a static website generator ;)
For context, I’m well into 50s
That’s cute…I just turned 71 recently. LOL Just givin’ ya the piss bro. But I understand your conundrum. I’ve had a computer in front of me since about the mid 70s and the Altair, and it’s not that I have some impressive repository of intellect, I’ve just screwed up enough along to way to learn a thing or two. Do, screw it up, nope that’s not it. #@#$ Do it again, hey that works, write that shit down!
Getting into self hosting did drive home the enormity of traffic on the tubes. You are kind of aware of the amount of traffic, but not really first hand until you open your first port and watch as a vast horde of bots pull a train on your little server relentlessly. They are like piranha and can smell an open port 22 from half way around the world.
There is a competent self hosting chan here: https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted. Good guys there ready to help. Like I said, I possess no great wealth of intelligence, but if you ever want somebody to bounce a few ideas off of, I’m always down to help in any way.
That’s cute……I just turned 71 recently. LOL Just givin’ ya the piss bro.
:)
Thx a lot for the link (and for the help offer!), I will have a look.
For VPN, I recommend Mullvad instead: https://mullvad.net/en
As they say in Italian “If my Grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike”
Sure… that’s an “interesting” premise but we live in our World, where a lot of American companies are structured the way they are by design. US companies get money from venture capital. That capital is solely designed to dominate. VC money is NOT a loan you get from a bank where you provide a collateral. No VC money is targeting 1 thing : market dominance and 10x returns. Your mom&pop shop will never get VC money because they never say they’ll corner the croissant market, rather they say might sell some baked goods to some people in your limited neighborhood. VC money will NEVER accept such a deal because it might eventually get 2x, at best, and the tiny shop does not even need a lot of capital, just enough for the oven, few people, etc. Peanuts in terms of investment money.
So… American companies are not “evil” because they want to or because a lack of luck. No, rather they become so because of the very structure money is made in the US. The Silicon Valley isn’t special because of Stanford or Berkeley and so many smart grad students. No it’s special because it pulls people from the entire World who dream of dominating markets. It then either select them or transform then select… and in the end you get the same kind of companies with the same kind of strategy with the same kind of money doing the same thing : domination by lowering price, cornering a marketing, raising price, enshittifying. Why? Because it works. It’s a proven business model. Right now it works on ads, and thus privacy… but if another model comes, it’ll use that.
TL;DR: it’s not perfect but it sure beats most if not all of BigTech depending of course on your needs.
In my experience, Duck.ai is practically useless, but their AI Search Assist is pretty spot on a fair amount of the time.
Word (about being practically useless). I have been using it to automate some stuff, like when I’m creating a json I just paste a bunch of data there and ask it to format for me, but I have to do in small batches and constantly correct the way it’s doing… Chat GPT was way better, but I don’t want to use it anymore
Sometimes I use AI to grammar check me (I’m not a native speaker) if I’m unsure of what I’m writing or I absolutely want to write stuff correctly, I did it a few times in Lumo, but I didn’t use it enough to compare with duck.ai, so I can’t say if it’s better or worse - but I always add “don’t rewrite, just point errors, ignore slurs, ignore slang, ignore informal language, ignore internet lingo” etc etc, and they go and rewrite my sentence changing everything hehe (again, Chat GPT was way better)Yeah, I’m used to GPT and Claude for code, so Duck.ai just pales in comparison, as much as I appreciate that it might be more private.
Edit:
Actually, seems you can get access to more advanced models if you give them $10 / month.
update: Lumo sucks.
I’ve tried all the search engines and duckduckgo is the only one that has all the features I need. As for privacy I can’t comment but there’s really no replacement for Duckduckgo, at best there’s Kagi but while I’d be willing to pay a one-time fee for search, a subscription is crossing the line.
All I can definitively say is that it’s better than Google in most use cases. The Hide AI images function is nice, but it’s not perfect. They don’t shove as many junk links at the top, though you’re still gonna get a lot of AI articles but that’s for every search engine nowadays. I use DDG as my daily driver.
By design, DDG doesn’t localize search results as far as I know. The only time I use Google is if I’m looking for a product in a store near me or if I’m really desperate otherwise.
I just did the seven-day trial, and I personally really like the VPN and the anonymous AI with the advanced models. The only downside is there are limitations. You can only upload one photo per chat, and you can’t upload documents for review. But all things considered, it’s pretty awesome. I really enjoy it. I probably won’t pay for premium, but if I were rich enough, I definitely would.
I would choose DDG Browser over Chrome and Edge, and Duck.ai over ChatGPT etc
but would you over Brave or unGoogled Chromium?
Check brave history and you will see the amount of controversies they have. I personally wouldn’t believe anything Brave says.
