A fork based on an older version of Tusky, with added support for Pleroma and Akkoma extensions. This includes things like quote boosts, emoji reactions, a toolbar for markdown formatting, and local-only posts, and it works quite well on Akkoma.
Husky runs about as smoothly as Tusky, with the exception that it currently needs to keep a background process running for push notifications. (It looks like the planned switch to Unified Push should resolve that.)
You can use it to connect to other server types like Mastodon or GoToSocial, but it doesn’t always know which extensions are supported. For example, it assumes Mastodon and GoToSocial will handle local-only posts the same way Akkoma does, and if you try, the post fails. And it hasn’t kept up with newer Mastodon features as well as Tusky has.
A search engine with related services and apps offering better privacy than the other big names. Search is currently serving less slop than Google. Disposable email aliases are convenient. The browser extension and standalone browser block known trackers, and the mobile app (at least on Android) can block trackers in other apps too.
Search
★★★★☆
It’s been a few years since I mostly switched from Google to DuckDuckGo for search. It used to be slightly worse in terms of search result quality, but it was a trade-off: Google tracked you and personalized your results, while DuckDuckGo was missing context because it wasn’t tracking you. Since then, search quality has gotten worse across the board as clickbait, content farms, and finally AI slop cluttered up the net. But Google’s results have dropped more: first they put the advertising execs in charge of search, sacrificing quality to keep people on their services, and now they’re going full chatbot.
At least for now, DuckDuckGo is returning slightly better results than Google.
DDG has been rolling out AI summaries, but not on everything, and at least its summaries cite their sources (unlike Google’s). Just as with Wikipedia, citations are critical to evaluating whether the summary is accurate or not!
Like most search engines not called Google, Bing or Yandex, DuckDuckGo remixes results from bigger general sites and smaller, more specific search sites. For the most part, since you’re not contacting Bing or TripAdvisor or wherever directly, it insulates you from tracking by the data sources they use.
Email Protection
★★★★☆
Duck.com is a free email forwarding service that filters known trackers out of your email before sending it on to your real mailbox. It also has a feature to randomly generate disposable aliases, which is useful for when you need to give a site an email address, but don’t know whether you can trust the site not to spam you or share your address with more spammers.
I’m still ambivalent about anything that alters incoming messages (other than stripping out malware), but the disposable addresses are nice:
You can deactivate them individually, unlike a catch-all.
Unlike plus-addressing, they can’t just be cleaned up to get your real address.
Creating them is instant.
On the downside, you do need to watch out for duplicates when you’re already subscribed to something at your real address.
Browser Extensions
★★★☆☆
DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials is an add-on for Chromium/Firefox browsers. It’s kind of like Privacy Badger in that it blocks trackers, adds don’t-sell-my-info flags, and blocks some social media embeds. But while it’s happy to tell you what it has blocked, it’s hard to find out what it will block. The main advantage it has over Privacy Badger and newer browser settings is that it detects email address fields and offers to generate a disposable alias right there.
Mobile App
★★★★☆
A few years ago DuckDuckGo launched a mobile browser for Android. I just changed the search engine on Firefox and Vivaldi, but my wife’s been using the app for quite a while, largely because it also cuts down on tracking by third-party sites.
I finally decided to give it a shot after trying out Ecosia, and my first impression is that it really wants me to know how much it’s doing to make things less annoying for me. Fortunately those notifications trickle off and stop fairly quickly.
The browser itself is fairly bare-bones, and it’s important to remember that it blocks tracking, not ads. It’s also missing things like reader mode. But at least it lets you move the nav bar to the bottom.
But it does add some other features you won’t find in Ecosia or other apps (or are harder to get at):
A burn button that closes all your tabs and wipes your history and its saved data (except for sites you “fireproof”)
Auto-generating disposable email aliases if you use a Duck address.
Duck Player, which opens YouTube videos without your Google account, and without targeted ads, and without adding them to your YouTube recommendations.
And then there’s “App Tracking Protection,” an option to filter outbound traffic to trackers from other apps (their example is a fitness app contacting Facebook). It runs as a local VPN on your phone, so it doesn’t need root. The downside to that approach: it interferes with trying to connect to an actual VPN if you need to. It’s interesting to see just how much some apps try to phone home, even when they’re supposed to be sleeping.
Desktop Browser
★★★☆☆
Somehow I didn’t notice until recently that they’ve released a DuckDuckGo desktop browser for macOS and Windows. It’s a custom application built around the system rendering engines, so it uses Chromium on Windows and WebKit on macOS. All the features of the browser extension are included, from tracker blocking to email alias generation.
Otherwise it’s pretty sparse, though it does include the burn button and Duck Player. There’s no extensions support, which means I can’t integrate it with KeePassXC or Floccus (for syncing with other browsers). Bookmarks sync only with other installs of the DDG browser, using a recovery key instead of an account, similar to Brave.
Controversy
I know there have been other controversies, but most of the commentary I’ve been able to find while looking for it stems from one of the following:
The mobile browser used to allow Microsoft trackers until they renegotiated their contract with Bing. The question here is whether you believe it’s more likely that they’ve pulled their act together or that there are more problems waiting to be discovered.
They down-ranked Russian propaganda outlets early in the Ukraine invasion, and certain very vocal people decided it must be political censorship and not just, y’know, downranking the low-quality results.
It’s not a perfect privacy solution. Well, of course not! If you need more serious privacy, use Tor. Most people’s threat model can get by with something that’s at least more private than Chrome+Google or Edge+Bing.
Successor to the late Sequel Pro, it still manages to be an unapologetically macOS application and a powerful database manager. Easy to use, responsive, stable. All the frequent stuff you need to do is in the UI, plus of course you can write your own queries when you need to. It can connect directly to a MySQL/MariaDB database or set up its own SSH tunnel.
Sequel Ace and its predecessor are the only database GUIs I’ve actually liked rather than merely tolerated. If it ran on Linux, or if it could talk to Microsoft SQL Server, it’s the only one I would use. It’s that good.
Ecosia is a non-profit search provider that uses renewable energy to power their servers and partners with local environmental organizations, most visibly (but not only) to plant trees. Ethical Consumer rates it 11, but notes that it depends on the lower-rated Google and Microsoft.
Search Engine
★★★☆☆
When I started seriously evaluating using Ecosia in early 2025, the quality of its search results was comparable to DuckDuckGo. Which is to say: at least it was better than Google Search since Google started prioritizing keeping you on its site over sending you where you want. Both add a layer on top of Bing, Google, and specialized site results (ex: pulling travel info from TripAdvisor), remixing them with their own priorities. Not surprisingly, for Ecosia this includes things like climate assessment and ecology. They don’t track your search history unless you actively opt into personalized results.
Also like DDG, they’re working on their own search index to reduce dependence on the big two. It’s still more private than searching Google or Bing directly, but it’s not their focus: Ecosia is more interested in minimizing and counteracting the environmental costs of the internet.
Unfortunately, as of October, Ecosia’s results have gotten noticeably worse. I had been using it on my work system to avoid using up my Kagi subscription on work-related queries, but it’s not finding stuff as well as it used to. And then there are the sponsored results for propaganda sites that I can’t even report to Ecosia because they’re getting it secondhand from Google. I’ve switched over to DuckDuckGo for now, but I’m considering finding out how much more I end up using Kagi when I use it for both home and work.
So I’ve stopped using it, and lowered my rating from 4 stars to 3 for search and overall.
Using Ecosia by Default
Some web browsers already have Ecosia in their list of search engines, so you just have to choose it. For those that don’t, there’s a Chromium/Firefox extension to add it, or you can add it manually using this URL in your search settings:
https://www.ecosia.org/search?method=index&q=%s
Desktop Web Browser
★★★☆☆
Another Chromium skin. It doesn’t seem to add much else compared to the basic browser, and there doesn’t seem to be any sync functionality (though Floccus works for bookmarks). But at least it doesn’t add a bunch of stuff I don’t want like Opera, Brave or Edge, and it’s ahead of Ungoogled Chromium in completeness and installing/updating.
I do appreciate that I can turn off embeds like the “Log in with Google” prompts that plague websites these days. (OK, I can log in with Google, but if I don’t want to – especially if I already have a login on this site – the pop-up is useless and annoying.)
Stripped-down Chromium with an ad blocker. No option to move the toolbar down to the bottom where I can actually reach it with my thumb, but then I can’t do that in Chrome either. I’d rather use Vivaldi or Firefox (or one of its derivatives) with Ecosia as the default search engine.
A simple mono recording app where the audio stays on your phone. No ads, no subscriptions, no remotely-generated transcripts, just basic recording.
I’ve found it useful for making quick voice notes I can come back to later, and for recording audio observations for iNaturalist when I can hear, but can’t see noisy animals. It should work for longer recordings too: there’s no time limit as far as I can tell.
There’s a setting to start recording as soon as you launch the app, and a widget in case you want one-click recording sometimes, and some simple options for choosing a bitrate and file format (M4A, MP3, or Ogg).