Do you also buy your milk in bags?

I suggest going for addons recommended by Firefox.

For blocking ads and other annoying content, I suggest uBlock Origin. It allows you to customize your experience, and can have the same or better effect than some other extensions. It is also not recommended to use multiple ad blockers, as they may conflict with each other.

For deleting cookies, I recommend not using an addon, but the settings of Firefox. Under “Cookies and Site Data” you can choose to delete cookies on close and manage exceptions for the cookies you want to keep.

For translation, Firefox Translations is fine.

Search by Image, I never used but it is recommended.

I usually avoid “redirect skippers”. As they can be as problematic as the initial problem itself. I cannot find FastForward in firefox and Skip Redirect is not recommended by firefox.

edit: spelling

Summary:

00:28 - Security is not privacy, prefer security

02:53 - Telemetry is not always bad

05:18 - Tor is not a trap

06:52 - Big companies are not more secure than smaller ones

08:58 - Icognito is only private locally

09:55 - VPN is not an infallible legendary magical tool

11:02 - Privacy is not dead, you don’t need to be 100% private

12:11 - “I have nothing to hide” fallacy

We need an extension like DeArrow for the whole web.

true. why should I need a facebook account? I only need to talk to the few dozen people I know, not to the millions or billions of mostly bot accounts.

Unfortunately, we still suffer a bit. A lot of internet content originates from USA and the rest of America. And the big tech companies, who control a lot of the market standards, are also from there.

The internet is absolute garbage now

Well, it always was. The internet was always filled with low effort webpages with ads from top to bottom. The only change is that as people got better at avoiding the old scams, new ones appeared with better CSS and more psychological manipulation.

ad-delivery platform

It is basically this. Most websites just try and dig into your profile, masking it as “personalized customer service”, but the real intention is to know what you do, who you talk to, and try to sell you goods & services.

I undertand this feeling. I have a group of friends which use Messenger as a main chat app and they refuse to stop using it for convenience, but most of the features they label as convenience are the exact thing that are wrong with it. Many other platforms, despite not being perfect, have the same/more features and are better implemented.

Even if you transfer to a new and better platform, the big companies don’t let go easily. They buy those new platforms and change them or just nuke them. If they can’t, they will use ways to detect who is using alternative platforms and alienate them. It is just like the Phoebus cartel, which controlled progress to maximize profit. They are not against you or progress, they are against anything which reduces their potential monetary value.

I disagree when you mention subscriptions as a bad thing. Subscriptions have existed since forever, and work well when you deal with a service, for example paying a subscription to a video creator you like, or maintenance costs of hardware you use.

But not everything is grim. I have seen a lot of new FLOSS projects appearing everywhere, and people are becoming more aware of the many alternatives. I’ve even seen non programmers using ChatGPT (or equivalent) to create their own self-hosted platforms, showing that even those not techinal people are able to contribute to the general community.