For what it's worth, it is now possible to delete your threads account without also deleting your instagram account.

There's also GoToSocial which is made to be lightweight from the get go.

I already use proton on PC, I needed one for mobile as well hence Calyx caught my eye.

(ProtonVPN's free plan is limited to one device at a time, that's why)

There's also https://justbeamit.com which iirc also functions in a similar way.

In my country, the state provides you with legal representation if you're unable to afford it on your own. Is that not the case in other countries (USA and Europe specifically)?

There's Revolt (FOSS, functionally the same as Discord but it's centralised) and Matrix (FOSS and decentralised but it's somewhat functionally different than discord). Both have their pros and cons. You can look into them.

Personally, I initially started with following accounts of some companies or softwares that I use or am passionate about like The Fedora Project, The Tor Project, Bitwarden, Blender, Proton, some game engines (and their creators) etc. You can usually find their mastodon handles on their website and/or somewhere on their twitter profiles.

After that I branched out from there gradually, following people as I found them in discussions, the explore page and through some 3rd party discovery tools as well like "Followgraph for Mastodon" which looks up all the people you follow on Mastodon and then the people they follow then it sorts them by the number of mutuals.

Matthias Ott (@matthiasott@mastodon.social)! I personally find his OwnYourWeb blog/newsletter really helpful as a newbie (comparatively) looking to setup my own webpage and blog.

Yeah, I just looked at the article and then found the NewPipe blog post dated 5 Dec so I though it was a new release. My mistake.

Oh wow, I didn't know it's used for research and policy discussions as well! That's pretty neat.

Well, that's essentially what it boils down to. Now it's up to users to decide based on their respective threat models whether they wanna use Ecosia or not.

Ecosia always sent user data to Microsoft (Bing), it's just that they will also be pulling search results from Google now so now they're contractually bound to send some data to Google as well.

The point is that it never was for extremely privacy minded folks, it's ofcourse a better choice than using Google or Bing directly because you're atleast not getting profiled as far as I can tell, but it can only do so much when it is dependent on ad revenue and has to work with Bing and Google for search results.

I'm not a privacy expert and this is just my opinion as a fellow Ecosia user, so take this with a grain of salt.