Maybe what you’re thinking is like an XMR version of Bisq's “Get your first BTC” room?

https://bisq.wiki/Getting_your_first_BTC This dilemma is real and understandable, while it’s not clear what would be the best solution:

For new users, Bisq requires between 0.002 and 0.007 BTC for traders to make their first trade: [...] It can be difficult for new bitcoiners to acquire their first coins, so this requirement is often a barrier for new Bisq users. The Get your first BTC room offers one possible way to get this initial bitcoin without signing up for a centralized exchange.

Basically the same thing for Haveno, I guess.

Cake Pay should be fine for most gift cards, I don’t think they usually ask for KYC for those.

So perhaps your recent bad experience with Mastercard EUR cards are rather exceptional?

It’s true that the EU is getting “difficult”. Ironically, the US (without GDPR) can be better, where the right to anonymous speech is more or less protected (although, of course, US hosting companies in general are not good for that).

IncogNet is a good example, where you can get a domain anonymously, just like from Njalla but the price being much affordable. Not only that, they’ll set up an onion/I2P version for your website for free. (This is not a recommendation, though. DYOR.)

Floki was once famous but, yeah… they’re getting a bit less popular now after the Covid things. It’s not Iceland and Seychelles based; basically it’s a German company, having servers in Iceland, Finland, Romania, and the Netherlands. Island was once very popular, but anymore. Using a .is domain now assuming it’s “safer” is a bit yesterday.

Especially, be aware of France: they’re like “you use encryption because you have something to hide, doing something bad.” Also, you might want to avoid EU domains (.fr etc.) in general: check about NIS2, so called “Thick Whois“ to see what this means. For example, you can’t get a .nl anonymous domain anymore (a recent change); a similar trend being expected soon in other EU registrars/resellers i.e. “domain KYC”.

PS: Incognet is based on Fran's (Frantech/BuyVM) in Canada, which has been generally trusted and has some good track record. One might want to consider BuyVM etc. too (Not a recommendation, DYOR).

PPS: Incognet accepts xmr, but you can’t do crypto-related things like mining on their servers. A negative point for some of us.

Confusing but the official site is not monero.com but www.getmonero.org, where you can see the full list of officially suggested wallets. Official GUI is a safe option. Feather is also good, Electrum-like.

Cake (Monero.com) is one of the suggested options too & is popular, but certainly not “most private“. With Feather, you can do everything over Tor, more privacy-friendly.

Most Monero users only use non-custodial wallets; so they just say “wallets” meaning that. Technically running a local node yourself is the most secure & private—though this option is not for everyone.

You’re right. Use a centralized exchange (CEX), and you’ll be KYCed and de-anonymized. That’s why most privacy-coin users prefer DEX. For normal persons, if privacy is important, using anonymous gift cards or prepaid credit cards, which you can easily buy without ID, is more practical, much better than KYC'ed crypto.

If you can somehow get KYC-free coin, maybe from DEX, i.e. if you can get it personally from your friend or peer without showing ID etc., then and only then, you have real private crypto. There are two popular ways for this (Bisq and LocalMonero). Another option called Haveno is hopefully usable soon, but that is still iffy.

Using DEX is not essentially difficult, much safer than you might imagine due to a mechanism called multisig, but maybe this option is not for normal people. When you feel experimental, you might want to try to buy a small amount via DEX, to see what it’s like. If you’re a popular programmer or artist, accepting donations in crypto is also an easy way to get no-KYC coin. Another option is p2pooling—you can get a few Euro worth of XMR relatively easily; yet this last option is time-consuming and not very effective. Many of p2pool users or full-node people are privacy-advocating volunteers, maintaining/participating the Monero network for philosophical reasons, fully aware it’s not profitable in terms of money. This might be part of the reason why Monero tx fees are almost zero (like 1/100 of that of BTC). At the same time, there are many sketchy people around crypto too 😟 Be careful and stay safe!

For users who watch videos, odysee doesn’t look good: infested with GoogleTagManager and/or GA, tracking people with sentry_key, etc. Using piped or maybe random instances of Invidious feels a better idea. For authors, though, escaping from Google is very important (anyone who can’t see this intuitively without even thinking, is not an artist).

Anyway… in one year or so, as soon as Monero->Fiat via CEX is regulated more tightly (if not banned), many of those companies now accepting xmr will probably stop accepting it. Then, perhaps we’re having some interesting experiments.

Buying gift cards with xmr may be a necessary evil, self-contradicting, not really circular, only introducing another kind of middle-man. Services like proxy stores do make sense, though—irl privacy is unfortunately not free-of-charge by default, so one may have to pay to “buy” it.

Although not Monero-centric nor commercial, disroot + Monero donation = custom domain(s) is probably possible.

(Like 2 years ago, there was also CTemplar, but no longer.)

I’ve been a long time Mozilla-supporter, since forever—since much before Firefox was even born. Every browser I use now is also Firefox-based [EDIT: one of them is SeaMonkey, not firefox-bsed but from Mozilla too]. As such, I wouldn’t like to say bad things about Mozilla. While I could clarify what I was trying to say, let’s just say several other people prefer LibreWolf to Firefox (I’m not a LibreWolf user, though).

In the big picture, we don’t want to be abused by big tech companies like Google, and relatively speaking, Firefox is a much better choice. Also, you’re absolutely right about how free software is supposed to work (at least in principle). Like I said, I really hope I’m totally wrong here.

The original (initial) post is a question about Brave, and we’re getting so off-topic now. Besides it seems that most Lemmy users don’t even read anything older than a week anyway, too busy to have a slow, deep conversations. So let’s call it a day. What I was trying to say in passing might become painfully clearer soon enough, or perhaps—hopefully—I’m just overly worrying about nothing. Although maybe Mozilla as an organization can’t exist anymore without Google’s financial supports (and so not in a position to keep saying “No!” to Google for a long time), as you pointed out, let’s hope that the philosophy of free (libre) software will prevail in the end.

As much as you’re free to be trapped in the conventional box, one is free to use or redefine languages; one may say, “you guys” among girls; anyone (male, female, neither or non-binary) is free to join some community of “brethren.” Males are welcome to live in a “sister city.”

For better anonymity, it could be actually more convenient as a decoy-shield if the name is misleading. As they say, “To fool your enemies, fool your friends first.” Although, this doesn’t change the fact that your point is valid & many people are often thinking in-the-box, including myself. If you feel someone is too stupid, you can ignore them without wasting your time & energy. Just a thought.

Thanks for your comment & link. I too think currently the Tor network is much bigger. I like Tor too! At the same time, recently I have this vague feeling that i2p might be the future… Honestly not yet sure.

Thanks, didn’t know LibreJS. Its concept is interesting. But there is a libre tracking JavaScript too. Besides, these tracking URLs on DDG are images (“web bugs”), not scripts. uBlock blocks these things on DDG already on its own.

Noscript can easily disable JavaScript for specific domain(s). One can install this add-on (or if you use TB it’s already there by default). So if disabling JS partially or totally is acceptable, that’s one of the options for DDG.

True. It's not much related to Monero. OP only says, "Many artists also have support links and wallet addresses for Monero" i.e. "accepting donations in Monero" which is nothing notable. (Many devs accept donations in XMR.) If they like Monero, that is good (though nothing more)...