@hans ya I know.. I've been struggling too.. But once I ditch my android for my librem phone, that's my excuse.. Other ways will be email (my own server) or pick up the phone and call me. Good ol fashioned communication :-)

@Zebulan
Great !! Zeb ! - How's the progress going on de-googling your life?
Wonderful summary.

@Millwood16 If I was a paying ProtonMail member, I would already be using the ProtonCalendar beta, but since I'm not, I'm still waiting for that to be released to free users after it exits beta testing.

No progress on the self-hosted cloud yet. I need to do the research to find out how exactly to approach the hardware aspect. How much RAM do I need? How powerful should the CPU be? Things like that.

Something I've been struggling a little with is trying to settle on an alternative search engine. Of course, all the decent alternatives are technically meta search engines, but I'm still not sure what I should be using.

I've heard DuckDuckGo donates to left-wing organizations, so I stopped using it. It's main draw for me initially was the "bangs" that let you quickly search from another website. (For example, you could type "!a toys" and you'd end up on the Amazon.com search results for toys.) Several months ago, however, I discovered that Dissenter Browser (and I thinkalso Brave and Chromium/Chrome) has a similar feature where you can set keywords to trigger using another website's search. So there was no reason left to keep using DuckDuckGo.

I tried using Toki as my default search engine for a while, but it doesn't seem to be able to pull results from the search engines it uses in some cases. I'm not sure if it's getting blocked from them or what. It's also a bit slow sometimes, which gets really annoying after a while. I wonder if they're getting too much traffic and that's causing the slowness. (It's worth noting that Toki is using the open source Searx software, which makes it one of the few open source search engines.) I might revisit it several months from now to see if they've managed to fix the issues.

I'm currently trying out StartPage... it's basically just a privacy-enhanced wrapper over Google. It seems to work better than Toki does at the moment, and though it's limited to just Google results, at least that's better than getting almost no results at all, which has been my experience with Toki lately.

@Zebulan
👍
My current set up:
Linux > Mint 19+ > Dissenter or Opera Browser > StartPage

I've been on my browser/ search engine journey for over a year.
For now, I'm using Gab's Dissenter browser, for the privacy & to support Gab. Gab used Brave's opensource code & then removed the tracking stuff to enhance our privacy & they also set the defaults for user privacy. I read an article that >90% of users never look at their browser privacy settings. The defaults preset with the user in mind, is a huge plus for the Dissenter browser, imo.

They need to work on a few things, which I think will happen when they get the Gab protocol built onto the Hydra back end. This move to Mastodon had some unforseen issues, like the code was unable to scale for such a large site, as Gab. So, seems like Gab staff fell back to fix the back end to enable support for all the great things coming in the months ahead.

Like you, on search, I've migrated from Google to DDG to Toki & back to Start Page. Toki is an alt-tech site & it may take awhile to bring it to full features.

My quest was to break my 'filter bubble' & found some interesting choices:
SwissCows, Qwant, the Russian Yandex and a few others. Performing a search for a keyword/term will have different results.

Pls keep me posted on your journey, as it does indeed seem to be a moving target. I'm hopeful the Alt-Tech sites will become our future. #Alt-Tech

@purism *using