It's even more trivial to remove the hard drive and read/write it directly, possibly even booting it on a separate system directly or in a virtual machine. BIOS passwords (on all x86 systems, not just Lenovo) provide very limited security benefits, but they can be sufficient for some basic security requirements.

Maybe you misread. aeternum gave two reasons for not "using Google": (1) they often shut down services—his/her original reason—and (2) being "evil", an additional reason and possibly a reference to Google's "Don't be evil" motto which is now used only in a very weak context at the end of their Code of Conduct.

See https://github.com/maltfield/awesome-lemmy-instances. That list of "random instances" is updated frequently from awesome-lemmy-instances.csv.