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.

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).

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.

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

The clip is from a documentary called "A President, Europe and War" and it is not fake AFAIK.

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

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

This worked, thanks!

Solution: Go to Settings > Home > Enable Shortcuts > Go to a new tab > Google will be pinned by default, hover over the Google icon > Click on the 3 dots menu > Unpin

@Frellwit@lemmy.world 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.

Yes, my default search engine is Ecosia.

I haven't changed it manually though, I installed their extension and it changed the default; if this matters in any way.

Yeah, I made this post after reading that article. There is clearly a problem with how domains and their renewals are managed. I'm not sure what a solution would look like, though.

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.

If you're using Bing anyways, consider switching to Ecosia, it's a non-profit search engine, they pull their search results from Bing and plant trees across the globe with their profits.

It might not be for extremely privacy conscious people because they do send some of your data (obfuscated IP addresses, user agent string etc.) to Microsoft because they use Bing but it's still orders of magnitude better than using Bing directly.

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

You don't need internet to access the passwords stored in Bitwarden if you have their local clients installed. It stores an encrypted copy of your database locally to your device which syncs (updates) over the internet.

Surprised to see LinkedIn's 930 million MAU! I might have heard someone mention it irl like 2 times my whole life? But maybe that's cuz I'm not in the job market yet.

All of the games ever played on lichess along with puzzles, evaluations etc are also open and free to download at database.lichess.org

The site's founder and lead developer Thibault also often streams the development of the site on his Twitch channel!

I'm honestly suprised sometimes at how free, open and transparent this site is, truly an inspiration for anyone looking to build an ethical platform.

http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/

https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/

https://thebestmotherfucking.website/

AA is just a discovery, curatorial platform.

It isn't just a discovery/search platform anymore. Source

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

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.

There's also GoToSocial which is made to be lightweight from the get go.

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.

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.

In my country, the state provides you with legal representation if you're unable to afford it on your own. Is that not the case in other countries (USA and Europe specifically)?

Oh wow, I didn't know it's used for research and policy discussions as well! That's pretty neat.

Yup, it says 390 million for Twitter, you might have mixed it up with LinkedIn's 930 million.

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?

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.

Regional pricing exists. The cheapest plan is $2 in some countries.

Regional pricing exists. The cheapest plan is $2 in some countries.