Got it thank you. I’m not happy about meta moving in this direction. I hope that Threads is a flop. I Ditched Facebook after the Cambridge Analytical episode and never looked back. I appreciate the info.

I’m new to federated services here and have a question. If say Threads federates with mastodon.social and I interact with threads content through mastodon.social does Meta get my information and data or do they only get a minimal set of info like username and the instance my interaction originated from?

No.

I run a private instance of searxng on a cloud provider. If you have the know how to run Docker or are looking for a reason to learn it’s a pretty painless setup.

Searxng is a meta search engine that aggregates results from a lot of different search engines. You have the ability to configure which search engines it will use. For example you can have it aggregate results from Google, bing, yahoo, brave, DDG, startpage, and quant. You have a layer of abstraction between you and those services providing you extra privacy.

You can run an instance on your laptop/desktop and access it locally which gives ok privacy and protects from JS and other browser level tracking. Problem is your IP can still be correlated to others in the same network who use google or w/e. Also makes accessing from your phone and other devices a bit more difficult especially outside of your LAN as you’ll need to poke a hole through your firewall and use Dynamic DNS for reliable access while mobile.

Another option with better privacy is to run the instance in a public cloud provider like AWS, digital ocean, Linode, etc. This way Google, bing, yahoo, and other search engines just see the IP of your cloud instance making requests. It also makes mobile access easier since your instance will have a static IP that you can assign a DNS name to.

In both cases you can use Caddy as a reverse proxy to serve as the public endpoint. Caddy allows you to easily set up TLS/HTTPS without paying for a certificate.

https://github.com/searxng/searxng