Holy shit I've been using markdown message boards for years and
you just blew my mind

Also even for accounts that are more than six days old, that's the beauty of the fediverse. Your instance does something you don't like, hit the bricks.

Some instances disable downvotes

Was out of the loop on that so I just did the most cursory search. What do you think of this take on it?

Was out of the loop on that so I just did the most cursory search. What do you think of this take on it?

What happened with Proton?

Yes, I switched to Proton as well and so far it's been really painless. Proton pass in particular is amazing.

It was a little hard to pay the real value for something I've gotten used to being so heavily subsidized, but I just am reminding myself that it's because they're not making money off of my data.

What's Ad Nauseum? What does it do and why do you like it?

Here's my list:

• Proton Mail: super painless to migrate over and a very similar user experience. Feels good knowing that Google can't read my emails and that they can't be subpoenaed by our insane government. Highly recommend. There's a free plan that offers 1GB of storage but I went straight to a paid account so I can't speak to that.
• Proton Pass: LOVE this. It was easy to import my passwords from LastPass and Google. The best feature is the "hide my email alias" which on my plan I can make unlimited ones. It's basically making an anonymous throwaway email that automatically forwards to your inbox. If you start getting junk mail you can see who sold your address, but also with one click you can delete it if it gets compromised. It's basically the equivalent of making a bunch of different Google accounts but way easier.
• Proton Drive: It came with my subscription but I haven't gotten that deep into it yet. It has a Docs alternative but not Sheets which I use a lot, so I'm hoping they develop something like that. Otherwise like a lot like drive. It's technically a photo backup too but the interface is trash (see next item). My goal is to get enough transferred that I can cancel my Google One subscription and maybe just use that for Sheets as needed.
• Ente Photos: Cloud-based photo backup. I'm slowly getting my photos transferred over but it seems to be pretty user friendly. It has some but not all of the features of Google Photos, like organizing by faces.
• Brave Search: They have a browser too but I'm just using the search in Firefox at the moment. I like that it's not based on Google's index but it sometimes means the results are not quite as good. Honestly for the payoff of not being algorithmed to death I'm fine with that.

I live in the US and honestly, I don't think anything will remain inexpensive. Even stuff that is produced domestically will go up in price because a) the value of the dollar will contine to decrease and b) if companies can get away with increasing prices while pointing to some external excuse, they will.

I hope one day you can find better friends

Keep an eye on it and ask your loved ones to keep an eye on it too. It can get much worse with age, and tends to be harder to recover from after every major episode.