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

I already use proton on PC, I needed one for mobile as well hence Calyx caught my eye.

(ProtonVPN’s free plan is limited to one device at a time, that’s why)

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.

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?

Just FYI, in India the president (head of the state) is more or less a ceremonial figure. It’s the prime minister (head of the government) that you’re probably talking about.

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

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.

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.

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

They don’t, though? Who’s forcing you to install a proprietary 2FA app in India. Unless you’re saying in general.

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

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.

AA is just a discovery, curatorial platform.

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

The recent advent of governments worldwide trying to force corporations to build backdoors into their services for the ‘safety of children’ or to ‘counter terrorism’ arguably does more harm than good for the common people.

Well, that’s essentially what it boils down to. Now it’s up to users to decide based on their respective threat models whether they wanna use Ecosia or not.

Ecosia always sent user data to Microsoft (Bing), it’s just that they will also be pulling search results from Google now so now they’re contractually bound to send some data to Google as well.

The point is that it never was for extremely privacy minded folks, it’s ofcourse a better choice than using Google or Bing directly because you’re atleast not getting profiled as far as I can tell, but it can only do so much when it is dependent on ad revenue and has to work with Bing and Google for search results.

I’m not a privacy expert and this is just my opinion as a fellow Ecosia user, so take this with a grain of salt.