This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/selfhosted by /u/doolittledoolate on 2025-01-22 14:10:28+00:00.
Just a few things off the top off my head that seem to have happened in the last month or two:
- My favourite thing about Chrome has always been that if you close multiple tabs at once, they don't resize until you move the mouse, so you can keep the cursor over the X. That doesn't work anymore.
- Javascript now forced for Google search
- More ads at the top of Google search
- Forcing Gemini AI onto Workspace users without the option to disable it
- AI at the top of Google search, often with bad conclusions
- YouTube now unusable without Premium. I was watching the 18 minute Silverbullet video a few days ago and I had 7 (no exaggeration) 40 second adverts during it. That's 25% advertising.
- Cutting off VPN accounts for Youtube Premium
- New versions of Android now force smart SMS through Google (tbh that could be old, I'm not sure when it came in). I also can't add a third party calendar.
Don't get me started with Google having a monopoly on indexing Reddit recently. There's also the monopoly on automatic WhatsApp backups, which they suddenly started charging for - causing people's email storage to be full.
Now, I know that a lot of these are Google's right. They can charge full price for YouTube, they can cut off VPN subscriptions, they can refuse third-party access to Google search, they can add as many ads as they like.
But in my opinion this nickle and diming is counterproductive. The extra revenue from this seems like a drop in the ocean, the amount of people who hosted something like Whoogle is negligible, and the people paying via a VPN were still paying. I feel like I'm witnessing the next Yahoo! in real time.
And hopefully it pulls a few more people into selfhosting and decentralisation.