Sadly not anyone, only admins. Beehaw situation is risk with big instances. At least it’s easy to change one if you start to dislike current.

DDG also partly buys results from Bing, so more good results with none privacy abuse. I only switch back to google when searching for images, DDG sucks at finding images.

At this point it 100% is. I could bother and use nonsense apps, and their poor players. But now that I need 5 subscriptions and it’s still like 40% chance that I find movie i want to see there it’s simply stupid. Also consistency with plex and much better quality, not to mention frequently found bonuses like deleted scenes or interviews with creators / actors. Another thing, it’s sad to see people switching to streaming lose their interest in exploring filmography by genre, director etc and only come down to brainlessly watching any garbage recommended by netflix.

Yes, instances share data. It’s called federation. Nice intro to how all this works: https://github.com/amirzaidi/lemmy