I like DDG a lot more, especially because of the bang shortcuts. But I transitioned recently to Qwant. It also has bang shortcuts and is hosted in Europe.

No it doesn’t. If Google stops supporting it, the community forks it and continues development. Has happened often in the past.

No. Brave builds on top of the Chromium engine which is from Google but open source.

You are right. My bad

Yes it should work https://support.plex.tv/articles/201214366-casting-support/

Raspberry Pi with Plex?

For me they are even better than Google. But I use Qwant now.

Chrome ➡️ Brave - Open source and privacy focused

Search ➡️ Qwant - Good search results and privacy focusing

Photos ➡️ Immich - Pretty much Google Photos but self hosted

Drive ➡️ Nextcloud - Use it with Hetzner Storage Share, pretty cheap and easy to use

Gmail ➡️ mailbox.org - European email hosting focusing on privacy

Meet ➡️ Nextcloud

That too.

Because of network effects.

Building a social network is hard. A typical chicken or egg problem. If you don’t have a user base, nobody is willing to join, and if nobody joins, you don’t have a user base.

It usually requires a bunch of money to build a social network.

The fediverse has a long time to go but I believe it will win sooner or later.