Just FYI, in India the president (head of the state) is more or less a ceremonial figure. It’s the prime minister (head of the government) that you’re probably talking about.

There’s Revolt (FOSS, functionally the same as Discord but it’s centralised) and Matrix (FOSS and decentralised but it’s somewhat functionally different than discord). Both have their pros and cons. You can look into them.

The recent advent of governments worldwide trying to force corporations to build backdoors into their services for the ‘safety of children’ or to ‘counter terrorism’ arguably does more harm than good for the common people.

Well, that’s essentially what it boils down to. Now it’s up to users to decide based on their respective threat models whether they wanna use Ecosia or not.

Ecosia always sent user data to Microsoft (Bing), it’s just that they will also be pulling search results from Google now so now they’re contractually bound to send some data to Google as well.

The point is that it never was for extremely privacy minded folks, it’s ofcourse a better choice than using Google or Bing directly because you’re atleast not getting profiled as far as I can tell, but it can only do so much when it is dependent on ad revenue and has to work with Bing and Google for search results.

I’m not a privacy expert and this is just my opinion as a fellow Ecosia user, so take this with a grain of salt.

I ditched Chrome about a year ago for Edge and just recently switched to Firefox, shouldn’t really be concerning as long as there are alternatives.