No instance is privacy friendly, literally all activity here is public by definition.

Yeah, Graphene is really great

I’d go with a discount reseller. You save so much money even with a Consumer Cellular, which is on the pricier end of resellers. I’d avoid Ting though, even though it’s probably the cheapest, if you like keeping your phone number. They constantly try to steal your phone number because it’s owned by some scammy Canadian ISP with a decades long track record of being an ass.

Tor browser inherently uses tor, as the other comment says, Mulvad offers tor browser sans tor as Mulvad browser. As per the “do you tor over VPN” issue I think we need to first cover some networking concepts…

So your internet works via protocols, UDP provides a basic connection where you can send unordered messages, TCP works on top of UDP to provide linear order. Things like old video chat and bittorrent work over UDP because you don’t care about order, you just want the data as you get it, so the video freezes or glitches, but you get the most recent frame of the video. Things like programs and webpages aren’t YOLO about data integrity, so they use TCP which enforces order, so you don’t get frames from 1 minute later in your Netflix video out of sync. VPNs provide UDP, which is lower level than TCP, which tor provides, so you can tor over VPN but you cannot VPN over tor.

If you use Mulvad browser from your VPN, you will look like everyone using Mulvad browser from your VPN exit point, which may well just be you, it’s fairly esoteric. If you use tor browser, you will appear to be exiting from a tor exit node along with hundreds if not thousands of other tor browser users.

[edit: just realized I forgot to actually address the is it worse to tor over vpn question. There is no privacy impact per you and the site, the question is state surveillance. Mentaloutlaw on Odysee says the feds will extra look at things if you tor from a VPN, but I really don’t buy that’s how anything works, I think most non-Germany state actors would look at ISP-level tor use to lock you up and not deal with the headache of subpoenaing a VPN provider to find out one rando is using tor]

Tor browser. Obviously you can’t bank with it, but, it’s really fine for general browsing. You get some blocking but it’s often just a matter of switching exit nodes a few times.

This all kind of depends on your threat model… a VPN hides traffic from your ISP, and puts your traffic in with a lot of other traffic, but domestic IPs generally rotate fairly frequently, so only your ISP really knows when that happens, but they also probably sell that data because we live in an over-financialized, under-regulated hellscape, but your VPN also exists in that hellscape, and knows who you are just as much unless you buy Mulvad with perfectly laundered monero and is as likely to be selling that data if not more so than your ISP. There’s a reason why people use tor…

Have you tried daily driving tor recently? You can certainly get slow speeds still, but in my experience recently they’re generally not too bad most of the time, especially for things coming out of the major CDNs.

Please don’t bank with a bleeding edge web engine that isn’t forked from one that’s been around for decades. It’s really not secure to use things that people haven’t had time to attack yet.

This relies on a ton of private companies in countries with even weaker consumer protections than the US in many cases. Like if you criticize Israel on pretty much any EU platform, they’ll throw you in jail if located there.

It is shocking how addicted people are to this app that no quantity of diminished functionality will make them leave. It’s like that Russian opiate that makes all your skin fall off. Crazy shit.

Reddit is reachable on tor and has a .onion version that supports both normal and old. versions

Yes, this is totally what I was thinking of!

I don’t thiiiiink that’s it, but like I said, I don’t remember the name, so it might be 🤷‍♂️

There used to be one years ago that used WiFi radios or Bluetooth or whatever so you could chat to people near you… I totally forget what it was called though.

I avoid installing anything that isn’t in F-Droid or Accrescent for spying concerns with a couple exceptions I Obtainium, so no banking apps. And yeah, notifications would be nice, but ideally FOSS privacy respecting apps will get better about actively seeking updates like a 90’s email client. Afaik, all push notification schemes that exist allow Google or whoever is the provider to read all notifications that go through that in the clear, which seems baaaad!

Graphene on a Pixel Tablet is great, and Orion Viewer on FDroid is a passable, albeit not ideal comic reader (it does tend to not do certain cbz’s at random for some reason tho)

Have you had a good experience? I’ve considered this exact setup, but obviously this post gives me pause…

Avoiding the advertising panopticon is your most actionable defense against the state’s panopticon.

An Android TV situation that you degoogle (you can remove a bunch of the Google tracking and ads via Android’s debug interface) would probably be better than either, and Android has EVERY app you can dream of. I’d suggest a linux box, but I assume you want a remote and I’ve never been able to swing a good remote situation on linux.

I’d be shocked if they block VPN. Virtually nobody uses tor for work but every company with decent opsec requires VPNs for SOMETHING potentially