I’m still sore about Google Music going away. That combined with Photos going paid was the one-two punch for me. In the process of migrating to roll-your-own solutions. There are a lot of good options in 2020!
Google Music was decent. This new replacement is not so good. The "I'm Feeling Lucky" mix was generally right. The YT versions are good for about five songs and then trail off into Do Not Like. No amount of thumbs down seems to be making a positive change.
I'm still sore about Reader too. Fortunately Inoreader is about as good.
I'm surprised thumbing things down isn't helping you - it was the thing that fixed YTM for me. I wasn't thumbing things down enough, now anything I don't want to hear again I thumb down, and I mostly listen to the personalized and discovery mixes. You might need to switch/reload stations for it to take effect. And IIRC the discovery mix only updates on Wed.
Google Reader has been gone so long that I really don't remember all the features that it had.
One thing that I seem to remember it having was a social aspect. Twitter doesn't treat its lists very well but it is possible to find somebody that you want to follow, then see what lists they're on. Maybe that leads you to other people that you want to follow.
The thing about blogs is that typically the signal/noise ratio is higher than Twitter accounts.
I was an ardent supporter of Google Music. Their web app sucked. It literally took like 10 seconds just to show up! So many missing features and recommendation was worse than someone coded it up in weekend. I still stuck with them, keep paying them and keep suffering. Then they decided to migrate the damn thing to YouTube Music and everything became 10X worse overnight. Now somehow YouTube vides is same as my music! Simple features like proper playlist management were entirely missing. Obviously, lot of empire building is going on here.
So that was final nail in the coffin for Google Music. I moved everything to Spotify (thanks Soundiiz!) and realized what I was missing. I thought I would now unsubscribe and stop paying Google Music so someone up there will noice. Guess what? They had no way to unsubscribe for Google Music anymore because they rolled the whole thing to YouTube Premium. So upper management will never know that customer left in droves. The empire builders who are working in this part of Google are super smart but they only use their smartness in building empires.
I was looking at OwnPhotos, Lychee, and Piwigo, but just today I turned up PhotoPrism which might be just the thing (haven’t really checked it out much yet but looks promising...Lychee seems like the tried and true open source solution afaict).
I’ve already dumped Google Drive for self-managed p2p file-sharing so it’s just a matter of hooking it up to a nice interface for family use.
If your photos are scattered over several drives and you need something to sweep then into one neat pile, try PhotoStructure (I'm the author). The current beta release is available for free in exchange for your feedback.
PhotoStructure looks awesome. I like how your site is almost a blog about the why-how etc, it showed me that your product is deeply aligned with my goals for a self-hosted photo solution.
I think you should prioritize in your “about” the ease of import from Google Takeouts (which is the killer feature for me personally at this moment anyway). You might also want to have a section that explicitly names the other “big” players in this space, since I didn’t turn up your solution when googling for “self-hosted Google Photos” when I first started down this path.
The one necessary feature that prevents me from choosing this right now vs some of the other open source solutions is a story about how to safely browse my photos using a logon with on any Internet connected device.
Speaking of, this might be a perfect use case for SQRL[0], although I’d be happy with a simple HTTPS username/password story.
Not making any promises, but let me know if you’d accept any help with your to-do list.
