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Hi, since Mastodon is no longer acceptable due to the 0.04 percent of instances found to have abusive material, would someone please suggest the alternative social network with 0 percent of these incidents? Companies like Facebook and Twitter are driven by shareholders and greed, Mastodon is a community effort and you’ll certainly find bad actors there, but I feel less dirty contributing to a community project, versus helping billionaires like Zuck and Elon line their pockets harvesting my data.

I haven’t used Chrome years, Firefox and Brave browser suit me fine. Since Brave uses the same engine and extensions. What’s the downside of Brave besides ppl not liking the creator? If I stopped using every device and product with an evil genius behind it I’d live in a cave somewhere with no technology at all.

Since Google has basically just turned into an advertising engine I’ve used their services less and less. I’m also not fond of the way they censor things, even when I agree with the ideology, I don’t think a mega corporation should be deciding what people are allowed to speak. Gives me a creepy dystopian vibe.

Aye matey, I’m so old I was using the internet back when we just said “Search online”. Kids in the US are literally taught in school to say Google, talk about product placement. Sometimes I say DDG, but honestly I’ve been using Brave Search lately.

Try another search engine partner, Google’s SEO has become increasingly less likely to find open source projects as their referral commission algorithm grows more greedy. Google is also no friend of our community as they continually remove our programs like “Kodi” from search results and target projects like YT-dl with takedowns. We monetize them simply by searching on their platform, genius for shareholders, terrible for consumers.

Imagine when film companies pay Google for access to pirate’s gmail registrations. I’m glad I switched to Protonmail years ago. Any of these “free” services will sell your information for the right price.

Google is going to continue boiling the frog until everyone using gmail, YT, drive, etc… is paying subscriptions for access to these services. It’s going to be interesting to see how much people are willing to pay to hold on to a gmail account they’ve been using for 20 years. I should buy Alphabet stock now.

When mentioning data harvesting leviathans, Facebook is definitely on the list, but Google is the undisputed champ of surveillance capitalism. They’ve just got so many people addicted to their “free” services that most don’t want to mention it. I use Firefox mainly because it’s not Chromium based.

I wouldn’t use Google for anything in 2023 partner. Not trying to troll your comment, but I think a lot of us just use it by habit. Given Google’s recent involvement with tracking ppl and DCMA takedowns, not to mention going after open source projects such as Invidious and YT-DL they’re no friend of our community. Just using their services let’s them monetize your data, hence supporting a company that stands against our values. I remember them removing applications from their autocomplete results like Kodi years ago, because the app “was used by pirates.” Give DDG or Brave Search a spin, once you’re used to it, it’s much better than staying on Google’s sinking ship, they’re killing themselves by selling the rankings of search results to the highest bidder versus yielding relevant information at this point.

Try to find a VPN that’s a nonprofit or community oriented. Usually the VPNs with the most marketing and advertising are the most profit driven and less concerned about your privacy. Use DDG, Brave search or anything but Google to research. A lot of people don’t understand that Google is just an advertising company that uses it’s search engine sell products, they also get commission through referral, so it’s in the company’s interest for you to pay more.

Use Mullvad DNS, they even offer a public address available to anyone. Last time I checked, Mullvad was a nonprofit, so hopefully less greedy than a corporate VPN imho. Public DNS is 194.242.2.2

https://mullvad.net/en/help/all-about-dns-servers-and-privacy/