It would be nice if Leta had tabs for images, videos, etc.

This?

StartPage should be !sp.

This is unfortunately the same type of experience I've had with SearXNG. 🙁

I haven't really experienced a worsening of DDG, and this is a bit off topic, perhaps, but—

I have yet to find a better alternative to Google's video search. Google Books also remains valuable in many ways, since it will give you different "search inside the book"-type search results than the Internet Archive will (and they also have some books that IA does not).

What's annoying to me is that StartPage, which is supposed to have Google search results, and by and large does, does not give the same video results as Google (go ahead, try it). It would also be nice to have an Invidious or FreeTube type front end for Google Books, and I believe there used to be something like that, but not any longer.

Some Google products still have definite value, it's just important that they derive no benefit from us using them.

This would effect Mullvad, right?

Could you explain/elaborate to a know-nothing (me) on the following from your link?:

Caveats of federation: Metadata leaking

When using federation, Matrix’s room states (containing a lot of Metadata) get replicated and stored indefinitely on every homeserver any user connects with or connects to. While this is a feature for enabling distributed chat rooms, it comes at a serious privacy cost.

To avoid this, you can either disable federation, or make sure that your users signed up with no linkable identifiers other than their user names.

Last time I tried SimpleX, you had to scan a QR code to go from Desktop to mobile and vice versa, any chance of them changing that? Otherwise it did look promising.

Really?🙏