The road to hell is paved with "good intentions". We desperately need to find a globally adoptable alternative to google and the services that it provides. Docs, Sheets, Drive, etc. are fantastic services in that they work really well on a massive scale. However, Google's increasing role as an arbiter of right vs wrong and a steward of information puts too much power into the hands of one corporation, whose best interests are provably not aligned with that of the general population.

I've been working as a SWE at google (in ads...) for over two years and I've really started to loathe it over the past year. The pay is fantastic and it's really hard to walk away from that, but the idea that they are not (or at least no longer) contributing to the better world that I think we need, has started to weigh heavier and heavier on me...

We should be able to implement services like these, that are free of ads, on globally distributed infrastructure, with no central authority, to have truly free-flowing information.

edit: added quotes around "good intentions"

We developed an alternative to google and the services that it provides. It's part of a growing open source ecosystem that includes NextCloud for file management.

If you want a totally free and open source alternative to Facebook and Google, that you can run on your own servers, you can find it here:

https://github.com/Qbix/Platform