I'm not sure, that's the one reason I use Instagram also. You could use something like MyInsta, which blocks ads and I think lets you disable shit like Reels. You could also try using an RSS feed with proxygram, although I've found the public instances to be unreliable and I'm not sure if it still works. Otherwise, you're going to need to somehow convince them to use a certain Mastodon instance instead (offering to host one for your local area might make people more interested, but even then good luck with that).

YouTube is probably going to be the next platform to entrumpify

My guess is that it's a neo-Nazi thing, so his promoting right-wing American politics (his largest userbase) is probably intentional and not just him being stupid

Nowadays I would recommend Zen Browser + uBO over Brave which has a nice user-friendly UI and supposedly disables telemetry. Before Zen Browser, disabling the crap Brave comes with takes a similar amount of effort as tweaking Librewolf's aggressive privacy settings, but one of them is actually privacy focused and the other is run by a shady ad crypto company with a shady news feed that keeps pushing Fox News and a homophobic CEO. For mobile there's Cromite.

With articles like this I wouldn't recommend them.

If your really feeling paranoid go ahead and use TOR browser to login to lemmy. Assuming they dont block TOR connections here I’ve never tried.

.w*rld blocks Tor a lot of times, .ml hexbear lemmygrad.ml do not

I'm using a 6 pro and it works fine

For Uni I use Typst for most documents nowadays and sometimes LibreOffice. If I need to open a .docx I use LibreOffice for that as well. It does fuck up the formatting sometimes though so if you have an annoying professor that requires .docx files perfectly formatted you might need to use Word in a VM or a lab computer if they're available.

Teams works on Firefox so I just use it there (there's also an extension that lets you install PWAs using Firefox so you can do that to Teams as well).

For Excel, I don't use it so I'm not sure what features you need and whether LibreOffice has all of them.

R works fine on Linux.

Well the election ended so there's nothing to argue about right now

They organize in ways that make a bigger impact to the community than voting for one of two fascists.

So now we're going to have AI training other AIs

To answer your question, I joined Lemmy when it was a niche open source project then left because nothing was happening until the mass migration happened