SUCKS TO SUCK

they had so much time during the pandemic too!!!

One thing you can do is watch some of the deal sites. www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsa... and slickdeals.net will often have deals on pre-builts. You can check comments to see what folks are saying about the builds. Just a suggestion!

Proton also has a storage solution called Proton Drive which is more of a solution like Google Drive, but I haven't tried it! If you're interested in building your own NAS let me know and I can give you some recs.

Hope all this helps, let me know if you have any other questions!

storage is... more complicated. I bought my own NAS (networked attached storage) and spent ~$800 on that plus hard drives. Then I also pay for a backup service through Synology (who makes the NAS box) which is also expensive but automatically backs up my NAS to the cloud, encrypted.

for email I'm using @proton.me: proton.me/mail. The company that runs it is based in Switzerland and they focus on privacy. It's end to end encrypted so no one can spy on your email! there's a pretty good free tier as well if you want to try it out.

sure! unfortunately most stuff isn't gonna be free!

for search I'm using @kagi.com: kagi.com. It's a paid service but it works really well! and the nature of their service means they have no way of knowing what your search history is so it's super private. you can try a few searches for free.

this has been my white whale! i watch WAY too much youtube, and there's nothing else like it. ive moved away from google for search, email, storage... but there's nothing to replace youtube!

reminds me of the one sarah scribbles comic. shit has been this way for 15 years.

ah, thank you 🤦‍♂️

and now with gen AI it will be even worse. they're going to use algorithms to determine whether you flagged some stupid thing in their ToS. Heck, they might even just use AI to try and figure out who is the least likely to care about - or equipped to deal with - their account being closed