1w ago

Thoughts on @brave and Brave Search over and @duckduckgo? Looking at #privacy and #foss alternatives to #bigtech. Educate me please.

Thoughts on @brave and Brave Search over @firefox and @duckduckgo? Looking at #privacy and #foss alternatives to #bigtech. Educate me please.

19 comments

Be careful using Brave because the owner is a Trump supporter.
- Same for proton
  
  Ehhhh do you have more evidence than a couple policy-specific / sycophantic tweets? I'm not sure I'd personally describe it that way
https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/
- @3aqn5k6ryk, thanks for the information. Now looking for something different
  
  @paulhulford @3aqn5k6ryk AFAIK librewolf is pretty good, mojeek is also a pretty good search engine but i still use duckduckgo. for android there's also ironfox
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CEO_and_resignation
- @woelkchen, his donations to anti-LGBTQ causes had me delete Brave.
I've been really enjoying Kagi.
- Same. Awesome dev team too, very accessible people on Discord
Firefox + Kagi is the best current option IMO
- @uawarebrah @paulhulford
  Firefox + Disroot 😉
  
  @choam @uawarebrah Disroot is one I have not heard of, I'll check them out later today.
This is a good resource
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/search-engines/?h=search
I've been using Startpage and I like it. I may try Kagi at some point
I use SearXNG, which is a “metasearch” engine that aggregates results from lots of different ones (you are able to choose whether you want to include google results, ddg results, etc.) and there’s also a bunch of options for searching images, videos, files, and more!
It can be self-hosted or you could always use a public instance (but then that means you have to trust whoever is hosting it with your data)
One reason I've been sticking with DDG is the amount of UI and feature customization it offers. Not just the number of settings but that they are sensible ones: it's stuff I care about. They also have a privacy-friendly way to save and restore these settings.
ignoring any political misgivings, brave’s always been a bloated trash heap that pushes its own ecosystem on you with unnecessary services. my advice would be to use either librewolf or use firefox and manually turn off all the telemetry and useless features you don’t care about (side-eyes pocket). if you are a die-hard chrome user ungoogled chromium seems to be the best option. really anything you might (dubiously) get from brave you can get from a browser that doesn’t try and hawk its cryptocurrency at you.
afaik duckduckgo isn’t terrible but it’s definitely been caught collecting information on your searches. better than google i guess. you could give searx a try though its self-hosted nature means it’s up to the discretion of the host what it wants to collect

19 comments