Star

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

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).

rdx.overdevs.com doesn't redirect to two different websites, it's a subdomain (which essentially functions just like any other domain).

The name being long isn't really a problem when most people just bookmark the sites they want to visit often and/or add the site to their home screen on mobile devices.

Moreover, using an alternate domain would incur additional unnecessary yearly cost & time to renew. The less maintenance these types of projects need, the better it is usually for them to survive long term.

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.

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.

You only see posts from people you follow, you can just unfollow (or mute/block) whoever you don't like to see on your timeline. If you're scrolling the trending/explore page then maybe you should try switching servers or just stick to the home feed which has toots only from the accounts you follow.

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.