Qwant doesn't prioritize privacy very well, besides leaning on its European-ness. Their privacy policy does not engender trust with me.

https://lemm.ee/comment/19796261

But as soon as you do Proton Mail + VPN, you then go with Proton Unlimited and that is what makes the most sense financially.

That's how they get you! ;)

Mail and VPN are something I would never want to cross associate, though. After all, any mail provider can see the full contents of any unencrypted email at some point (including Proton), and any VPN provider can see as much as your ISP used to see about your internet activity.

I'm of two minds of this. On one hand, like you said, all your searches will still track back to your IP address.

But on the other hand, if it's a pseudonymous IP address, you might end up giving out less information then if you contacted the search instances directly. You don't have to worry about scraping away cookies or using a specific browser or always being connected to a VPN. In essence, the self-hosted instance is your "VPN" for searches.

It would be nice if you could get your friends to also use your instance, but if not, I think a self-hosted instance for a party of one is not a meaningless venture.

I don't know if it's accurate to describe Qwant as "private." There is a bit to be desired with their privacy policy, such as them apparently sending your IP address to Microsoft

https://about.qwant.com/en/legal/confidentialite/

There's also this bizarre section

If you have not consented or are not subject to the Services offered, we automatically collect technical data... Salted hash of the IP address..., market segment of a query, date and time of the visit, information about the country and chosen language...

Anonymized by Microsoft after 6 months.

Amazing how your post history illustrates you only care about one topic. Like the last time I saw one of your posts:

These articles are getting so obscure, that you probably had to peel through a good amount of stuff that people here would find way more relevant.

And based on other articles from this same website, they are American exceptionalists. And not competent about technology. Here is another article of theirs, "how autocrats weaponize AI", which was published last month and refuses to mention the Trump administration among their list of autocrats.

The article is also extremely stupid, misrepresenting how Signal works.

Encryption apps like Signal use AI to ensure secure communication and protect activists from government surveillance.

I don't know what the author was smoking when they wrote that, but Signal does not use any AI.

This is extremely context-specific. But it would definitely be nice if posts were still accessible even if they were removed from communities, especially if there's a difference between somebody breaking a community's rules versus breaking their instance's rules.

For example: you might have posted something that is otherwise unobjectionable but off topic in a community. The only way for a moderator to remove it is to fully censor not just your post, but also every comment under it.

CEO: Why would we take your data, you directly fund us so obviously we will only focus on providing the best search experience

CEO: dumps money into AI and a T-shirt factory

Okay, so for those of us using third party apps like Thunderbird, everything is done using app specific passwords, which is great

The new feature for Email App Passwords for external email programmes

But if this is a new feature, how did third party apps work before? Could people just not use them if they enabled 2FA?

Edit: ...a decentralized Monero exchange

There's the Monero shilling I expect in every comment

In fact, if you Google “FOSStodon Elon Musk,” an interesting trend appears. Anything I clicked that was critical of Musk and posted to the instance this year was deleted

Holy shit. Can you provide some examples?

Carrotcypher freaks out about any anti-Musk article in any subreddit he doesn't control, and many he does, but I didn't think the moderation was happening behind the scenes on FOSSTodon too. Which is especially reprehensible because the creators, admins, and other mods of FOSSTodon all seem pretty resolute in condemning Musk before he went full fascist.

I noticed this stuff was more measured before mid January (almost right around the Trump inauguration) but it's started expanding pretty rapidly. Maybe I need to put in a little extra legwork and figure out which news sites are being auto-censored based on his personal opinions faster than I had anticipated.

For your consideration, same moderator on the same subreddit

• DHS allows surveillance based on sexual orientation. Reddit's privacy moderators ban any mention of it
• r/privacy moderator censors criticism of CEO James Dolan
• r/privacy moderators blacklist German tech news site Heise, censor posts critical of DHS
• On Reddit's r/privacy, you can no longer criticize Facebook
• "NSA chief and deputy fired", censored