Gunther

I'll add that there is also controversy surrounding the game due to the goblins allegedly mirroring a lot of antisemitic stereotypes

https://www.jta.org/2023/02/10/culture/are-the-goblins-in-the-new-harry-potter-video-game-really-antisemitic

Admin of the instance posted that they wouldn't ban anyone for playing the new HP game and in addition would not allow spoiler posts from said game. Admin got a lot of grief for this and announced the server shutdown in response. He then preceded to tell a few different people who critiqued him to "kill themselves".

I think YouTube Vanced is no longer supported by the devs and it was never a privacy-focused project anyway. There are plenty of FOSS Android apps that can stream YouTube more privately though. NewPipe is probably the most popular.

Switching browsers is probably the easiest with the biggest impact, but you've already done that. Switching your search engine to a privacy-friendly one is also a good step.

For now the community has just a little over ten subscribers and very few posts (besides my own) so I'm content to leave it up to users' judgements. If it gets more popular that may change.

That's a decision that would either have to be made by the instance admins or the moderators of the current general meme communities. Absent that, I think a dedicated non-political meme community is a good solution.

Perhaps, but that is the decision of the moderators of those meme communities. Starting a new meme community is free.

VPNs have a solid use case, though of course cannot provide the anonymity of the Tor Browser. The article actually does a pretty good job of laying out the pros and cons of each, so it's a little disappointing that the title is so click-baity and oversimplifying.

It's cool that they have that info (hadn't noticed it before), though it only looks at the front end code, there is no way to check for any malicious code on the back end. At the very least, logging the IP addresses that use the search engine is trivial without any changes to the front end. Actually correlating search queries to IPs would probably be harder since the query isn't in the URLs, but maybe not that much harder, I'm not sure.

There's no such thing as "couldn't log" when you're talking about an open source project. The source code can always be modified. Even if something is open-source, you're always trusting the one hosting it with your data.

As you've said, the major issue with SearX and other open source and self-hostable options is that they don't have their own crawlers and self-hosting means giving your IP to the big tech search engines you're pulling results from. Tor or other proxies are always an option to prevent this but they make it more likely that your search requests from Google, etc. will be blocked. For centralized search engines with better-than-average privacy policies and their own crawlers, Brave Search probably is the best option at the moment in terms of returning relevant results.

That said, I'm eagerly awaiting for an open-source, self-hostable search engine with its own crawler. We shouldn't be satisfied with the current lackluster options.

DDG censors things based on politics because Bing (where it gets its search results) does. And Google also censors results based on politics so I'm not sure how SP is a step up in that department. That being said, Google's results tend to be more relevant to the search query than Bing's, which is why SP's results are often more relevant than DDG's.