Ask Lemmy

Despite the quality of their results going down in recent years and getting worse because of AI slop, the search engines I would miss the most in terms of type of service. Most alternative search engine still use the indices of Google and/or Bing and the ones that don't, don't have a very big index. I'm old enough to remember a time when search engines were plentiful, but terrible, and back then I actually made use of web directories, like Yahoo! at the time, more. A still-existant example would be Curlie, an heir to dmoz, and there are also more local sites like the Dutch Startpagina. Being more dependent on things like that would probably make my web usage more exploratory and less about trying to find a specific piece of information quickly. And I would also go directly to specific websites more often when I do need specific information. But there are also a few companies working on making a European search index and this happening would undoubted accelerate their efforts, so depending on how that works out, not much might change at all.

Streaming-wise, there are local streaming services for films and TV shows and they would undoubtedly expand their offerings with the loss of competition from American giants, but also, I never stopped buying BDs and DVDs (in fact I have a backlog). I never understood the appeal of music streaming, so I still buy music, sometimes even on CD. As for something like YouTube, Nebula is America-based, but it's not "big tech", so I would watch more of that. Niconico Douga isn't what it used to be, but that might change without YouTube. And there would probably also be some movement towards federated video streaming.

I don't actually make use of any of the big social media platforms. Technically, I have a LinkedIn account, but I don't really use it and wouldn't miss it. It's not really social media, but I do use WhatsApp, but that being gone would just make it easier to convince friends and family to switch to something better.