What a good timing, honestly. In recent news of Nov 11th, Ecosia and Qwant, two European search engines, join forces on an index to shrink reliance on Big Tech (TechCrunch news article):

Qwant, France’s privacy-focused search engine, and Ecosia, a Berlin-based not-for-profit search engine that uses ad revenue to fund tree planting and other climate-focused initiatives, are joining forces on a joint venture to develop their own European search index.

The pair hopes this move will help drive innovation in their respective search engines — including and especially around generative AI — as well as reducing dependence on search indexes provided by tech giants Microsoft (Bing) and Google. Both currently rely on Bing’s search APIs while Ecosia also uses Google’s search results.

Maybe it’s time for Europeans to support more European tech companies and leave USA-based tech companies behind, here is a good start: https://european-alternatives.eu/

This comment looks like the sort of bot comments you usually would see on Reddit, unable of constructive criticism, just plainly hate on things and don’t make your case.

I don’t think its the best alternative either but definitely better than ads, why should you be mad some people can customize little things in their profile? Discord does this and you don’t see many complaining about it, they usually criticize other aspects of Discord. Also, you can’t even currently do that on Mastodon I think (correct me if I’m wrong, I could be), you could easily do that on Misskeys which most instances are japanese and the biggest instances don’t accept non-Japanese residents because of past history of people forcing english when they clearly state to be Japanese-only. Also, it’s closer to Mastodon in terms of usage and looks than Twitter, and Mastodon isn’t so similar to Twitter. Easier for this guy to criticize when not suggesting what should be done instead, people obsessively hating on BlueSky doesn’t look so upset some of them are going to Threads instead which is a lot worse for the Fediverse to reach to and from, compared to BlueSky. Maybe give ideas on how to make it easier for non-tech people to be more appealed to use something they’ve never heard of (federalization), have to choose an instance (at this point most already give up) and learn how to communicate with people from other instances. So hard to make constructive criticism, right?