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)

I use Ecosia, it plants trees with the profits from its ad revenue! Results are sourced from Bing and Google.

I’m sorry if I sound naive but what’s wrong with using a mobile?

I thought people use traditional music players like iPod and Tangara only because of their retro feel, is there something else to it?

Just FYI, in India the president (head of the state) is more or less a ceremonial figure. It’s the prime minister (head of the government) that you’re probably talking about.

They aren’t E2EE by default. You have to enable it manually.

They also run bookwyrm.world! A fediverse alternative of Goodreads.

Their generous offering of 10gigabytes of free storage along with a private, ad-free, end-to-end encrypted experience always sounded too good to be true. There was no way they could sustain that business model long term. At least they’re giving users enough time to jump ship and have not sold their data to Notion (judging by their twitter replies).

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.

they don’t “plant trees” but rather contribute very little amounts to existing programmes

Ofcourse they don’t plant trees themselves, it’s a search engine with a small team. They donate their entire profit which averages upwards of a million euros every month, to local tree planting initiatives across the world and that isn’t a ‘little’ number at all.

“Every search plants a tree” is a lie. It’s not every search, but rather every couple clicks on an ad

I agree, they were ‘a bit’ misleading with that in the past. Although they did state in their tree counter earlier and somewhere in their website/blog that it was roughly 45 searches (in Germany, depends on region) which raised enough money to plant a tree. They’ve since removed most, if not all of the misinformation.

They use Bing results making them useless

Since when does using Bing results make a search engine a ‘scam’? DuckDuckGo also uses Bing results, would you call that a scam as well? Ecosia uses Bing search results because it’s close to impossible to make an independent search engine which gives satisfactory results without the resources of a tech giant.

It’s so ridiculous when corporations steal everyone’s work for their own profit, no one bats an eye but when a group of individuals do the same to make education and knowledge free for everyone it’s somehow illegal, unethical, immoral and what not.

Under the same umbrella, instagram is dead unless you’re selling something.

Instagram is far from dead. It is quite popular in South Asia and actually the social media of choice for many teens.

@[email protected] is right, the following FAQ is from the uBO’s YouTube Mega Thread on reddit.

How often should I manually update filter lists? Can I somehow automate this?

YouTube filters are in a list named uBlock filters - Quick fixes. The list updates every 12 hours. It’s the only list you might need to update - only if this page says it’s fixed, but you’re getting the message.

If you’re not getting detected. Don’t update. Current estimated cost for just ONE of uBO’s CDNs: HERE. This is with other lists updating every few days. uBO’s not a company, it’s a volunteer project using free services, which have limits that we cannot cross.

They don’t, though? Who’s forcing you to install a proprietary 2FA app in India. Unless you’re saying in general.

English isn’t my first language

It isn’t mine either, we’re all learning :)

predecessor

I think you meant successor.

The recent advent of governments worldwide trying to force corporations to build backdoors into their services for the ‘safety of children’ or to ‘counter terrorism’ arguably does more harm than good for the common people.

How is it not? It’s IT, Information Technology

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.