IMHO Zulip is a great choice for text chat for teams for companies. In your case take a look at Movim, XMPP based, Movim can do blogs and more: https://movim.eu/

signal-cli software can do this without physical phone. https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli/wiki/Linking-other-devices-(Provisioning)

Posteo, 1 Euro/month since many years. https://posteo.de/ Germany based, and you can even pay with cash. I noticed Proton does not allow email forwarding with the free plan. With Posteo you should be able to use pop3 (not possible with Proton free plan I think) and fetch your inbox content if you like.

Thanks. Requires root though. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/dev.ukanth.ufirewall

Besides having a go at removing apps you can install NetGuard https://f-droid.org/packages/eu.faircode.netguard and then block all apps including system apps from using network. From there allow only the apps like Signal you want to give network access to. Drawback is that NetGuard needs an internal VPN connection to work so you can’t use a VPN services and NetGuard at the same time.

Friendica is an alternative for Facebook. https://friendi.ca/ There’s an Android app for it : https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.livefast.eattrash.raccoonforfriendica

Maybe this one ? https://www.pivpn.io/

Using your own domain is a great choice. You should however check whether your domain provider does auto extend the domain name for you, and if not, make sure your contact details are correct so you will get a reminder before the domain will expire after a year.

The other thing is that not all domain names are kind of equal. Some domain names have or had a bad name already when it comes to spam filters. For example IIRC the dot xyz domain names did have a bad name at some point, though maybe not anymore.

Also for serious emailing with companies for example my_name.lol may not be the best choice :-) Then there’s the question where to host your email. For example mailbox.org and Tuta do support custom email domains.

Why not let that email get forwarded to another email account of yours ?

Riseup provides email accounts and mailing lists. Anyone can create a mailing list.

But for an email account you will need to know a friend who can give you an invite code. Riseup is meant for activists though.

Disroot is open for anyone to ask for an account.

Don’t forget to donate to Disroot if you can : https://disroot.org/en/blog/disnews-24.12

But here’s the challenge: we’re falling short of this year’s financial target. Even worse, we’re unable to support the open-source projects we rely on as much as we used to. While donations have increased since 2020, the number of supporters has stayed the same. To all of you loyal contributors, thank you — you’ve kept us going! 🙏

However, we need more people to join. Small contributions make a big difference when more people chip in! If you value the services we provide and haven’t started supporting yet, now is the time to act. Together, we can sustain a real alternative to big tech services (where you are the product).

Thing is that searx.be has been remarkably good for my use case since a long time. With other instances YMMV.

The mentioned server side changes (e.g. A server move you mentioned but could also be server settings, provider settings, etc).

I guess that is the case. According to https://searx.space/ the searx.be server is in Austria but might use some proxy to talk to Google and similar to avoid quick blocking. The maintainer of searx.be also maintains yewtu.be and that one uses proxies (The proxy names can be seen when blocking auto play of videos in Tor browser).

Also getting results in Russian here since a few days. Usually it is either Swedish or Dutch. Never German.

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Indeed. I tried on mobile with LibreTube and with Mull and both fail. And also fails now in Tor browser. The list is getting shorter.

Now I’ve tried almost all of them in the Piped instances list (Several domain name for sale and server not found errors) and only the smnz.de one works for me. :( I am wondering whether a freshly installed self-hosted private Piped video instance will work fine.

Works for me still (Using Tor browser. I’m Europe located).

The instances list is not up to date :

• List of instances : https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/wiki/Instances But after trying maybe more than 10 of them I found one which manages to play a video :

https://piped.smnz.de/watch?v=bBhDWTZDH9c

There’s probably more working instances.

Plan B : I guess running your own Piped instance and not sharing it with a lot of people could be worth considering.

Personally I’m sticking to https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Yt-dlp#Faster_downloads for the video downloading I do.

Was about to post the great blog post from my bookmarks, but another commenter beat me to it (t y !). Here’s comments on that blog post on Lobsters and HN :

• https://lobste.rs/s/gqoj5n/passkeys_shattered_dream
• https://web.archive.org/web/20240507211213/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40165998

Tested playing a video with an Invidious instance right now and it worked. Did you try another instance ?

That’s because you’re using it for a purpose it wasn’t intended. I2P isn’t designed to be used to browse the regular internet, for that it’s better to use TOR. However for anonymous torrenting or accessing i2p-sites, it’s quite fast imho.

Okay, good.