Not too long ago I would have agreed with you. But at some point, I realized I grew up in the same environment they did, surrounded almost entirely by Republican Christian nationalist propaganda, and I saw past it by listening to the people it was targeting. They might be brainwashed, but they can still choose to listen to other people also, but they don't, so their ignorance is their own fault.

Funny enough I know people IRL who are right wing and think that dragons existed

The most important part is balancing your own safety with limited time and resources. Perfection is not achievable, getting as close as you can is not practical in most cases, and prioritizing safety a lot of times limits what you're able to do. So you need to do a cost/benefit analysis on these sort of solutions and decide whether they're worth doing, which is very contextual (and in the end, you're going to need to trust something somewhere unless you reinvent everything on your own).

For instance, in the US if you're a middle class cishet white male citizen who ignores politics, you're biggest problem is probably ads, companies knowing your financial info, and tools being more locked down, so the reasonable response would be to use an ad blocker and switch to open source/self-hosted software when it's convenient, but not to the point where you have to program all sorts of things yourself unless you really enjoy that. If you're working class, time and finances is more limited so the extent to which self-hosting, paid services, and CLI tooling becomes impractical might be sooner. If you're a minority, there's not really much that can be done that doesn't severely affect quality of life (like living in the middle of the woods with no technology if you know you're being hunted by the government, which sounds fucking terrible but probably better than being sent to a concentration camp in a remote country). If you're an activist or an immigrant or doing something illegal, compartmentalizing data that would probably get you in trouble onto devices (that you can afford) with a strong security setup that doesn't touch anything else you own and doesn't cross borders while verifying that the people you communicate with are also on a similar setup and doing other "paranoid" security/privacy measures (while being careful not to draw suspicions) is probably a good idea. If you're trying to be private for the sake of advocating for privacy, then do what you want to do.

Kagi isn't privacy focused but it doesn't use your data for ads either. The main benefit is good search quality and more control over the search results.

It also blocks Tor, other instances don't

Not at all, I don't eat eggs regularly

Riseup and Disroot are run by collectives, Tuta uses a similar business model to Proton, Mailbox.org + Guard looks decent as well and more open than either Proton or Tuta

It doesn't have to be "real weird shit" though for it to be a problem, coordinating about protests or other political activism on Signal is sketchy because of the phone number requirement, and just having your phone number be associated with another suspect phone number from inferred conversations is enough to potentially get you in trouble. Or if some national anti-abortion or anti-LGBTQ law happens and they put serious effort into enforcing it, activity on Signal, which is not anonymous, could be used against you and people you had conversations with. Yet I've seen multiple groups who shouldn't be using Signal use it anyway and people thinking they're anonymous on the platform because it keeps getting recommended. SimpleX and Cwtch have weaknesses also, but both of them take anonymity more seriously than Signal does.

I use Kagi and uprank non-shitty sites. I think there's also uBlacklist or uBO filters that can remote shitty sites.

I'm in Dallas and it fucking sucks, tons of suburban sprawl, tons of roads but public transit is barely functional and hard to design efficiently, a lot of the roads don't even have sidewalks or they just randomly end, the roads are designed in a way that promotes aggressive driving making it even more dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians, the local business scene here is depressing outside of restaurants and entertainment but there's like 20 Walmarts.

People were condemning the Pro-Palestine protests on my campus because "they could have followed the rules" and apparently sending a bunch of state troopers with weapons and snipers and a tank and arresting 20 protestors was a justified punishments for having a few tents and a tarp.

As much as I hate GitHub, for in-person projects involving multiple people I usually end up having no choice since they usually think GitHub is the most important programming tool ever and nothing I do is going to convince them to create an account on something that's not GitHub.

For personal stuff I use Forgejo and disable everything except the code view, so I have a quick way to show people stuff I'm doing (for career reasons).

If I was doing a project with multiple people and actually got to chose the platform I would probably use Forgejo or Codeberg and make use of the project management features.

Pijul looks interesting but the ecosystem is very lacking and it doesn't integrate well with Guix which I base a lot of my workflows around, so until this improves switching to pijul creates more problems than it fixes. The only other VCS and frontend I'm familiar with is GitLab which I don't use anymore self-hosted since Forgejo is more performant and the main version randomly deleted all my repos and changed all sorts of stuff.

cgit also looks interesting, I might look into it.