I completely agree with you, and what i wrote was in haste, essentially, what i wanted to say, was that an individual running searxng does not provide the anonymity benefits you would get by using some public instance, but it it still better because you are not directly using google or whatever website, and now searxng kinda acts like a browser between you and them, which does limited conversation - there aren’t any js based fingerprinting. I also use searxng locally, i cant stand the constant rate limiting of public servers, or sometimes only a few engines are blocked, and variation in result quality is unacceptable to me. I just wanted to add that bit for transparency,

If you are on a desktop, you can run it locally, you are much less likely to be rate limited, but this comes at cost of your ip being still visible to google or whatever search engine you choose to scrape from

Is there any way i can host the whatsapp bridge but not the matrix instance itself, or something simpler. Even then, it does not really make my situation better. It would be adding one more layer between me and whatsapp, but not much more. As I understand, bridges help when you have multiple platforms, and you want to have one way to access them all, for me, only benefit would be the client would be free

I personally do not use them anything else now, i do have element installed, but when you have no one to talk to, you might as well write messages in a notepad

Whatsapp. I know signal, simplex, matrix, (a billion other things), etc exist that are much better, but where I live, no one uses them, for context, basically everyone, like if you have a phone, you use whatsapp, some government things even happen through whatsapp bots, when people say the word message here, they mean whatsapp. There are about 20-30% (among younger folks) who use telegram, but that is mostly for easier piracy, and larger file sharing (before whatsapp allowed 2 GiB, now they do it habitually). My mom has about a 1000 contacts, and less than 10 of them actually use signal (there are many more who signed up(there was another thing, basically when elon said “just use signal”))

At this point it is not worth getting everyone to switch, the best i have done, is just reducing the number people i communicate with (on whatsapp), and try to just meet in person

I recently wrote my thesis in typst, best choice i could make

see when i started viewing youtube (2018-19), i had poor internet connectivity, and naturally started with 1080p, but my stream would stutter, so i started to decrease quality 1080>720>540 and so on), at same time, i started to watch stuff at higher and higher speed (normal is 2.3x for me now), and i realized i was not getting anything more by watching at higher res (i increase it to 360-480 sometimes if there is very small font, but rare), so i naturally grew to watch stuff at 144p, now i have good enough connection to watch maybe smooth 2x 4k (sometimes i get 200 Mbps) all the time, but never feel the need to do it (i have set mpv, yt-dlp, all my other video players, to have default res of 144 (or whatever the lowest they serve))

until last year, i used to watch youtube with “3gpp”, they used to serve at 144x192 (so 4x3) at ~7fps, which at the usual speeds i watched, seemed pretty good (audio bitrate was roughly 15-20kbps), and was legitimately sad when they stopped doing that, i could no longer have a 10 min video under 5 MiB (with audio)

I used to maintain an archive of content i liked which was almost exclusively self compressed low bitrate x265, and only recently have started to save 720p-1080p (still plan to compress most to 720p AV1 at reasonable bitrates

I usually do not comment but i was weirded out with the file count (i know it is just a meme, and not serious, but lets assume that), then average file size is

28.9*1024MiB/14690 = 2.014540504MiB

(this assumes it is a standard windows install where windows counts in binary system, and represents with decimal units, but even if it actual GBs and GiBs, the error is small)

lets assume it is 144p (i usually watch yt at that), and lets assume you have it all in great cpu AV1, and lets take a typical yt bitrate at that quality (and lets assume its video only) 100 kbps

then average duration of a file is

2.014540504*1024*8kb/100kbps = 165.0311581s

so that is a little less than 3 mins (assume video bitrate stays constant throughout, which is definitely not true but easy to calculate)

and just for completeness, lets calculate the amount of total time to “watch’m all”

165.0311581*14690/(60*60*24) = 28.05911704

so that is a little over 28 days (i was expecting less, but then again, just a meme)

Edit: i left out the possibility of images, if that is the case, it is technically 0 time, but at the same time, a good JXL 2 MiB image is pretty good quality