Never thought this would be the thing that drove me to degoogled myself, but here we are. I put myself back in an apple silo purely out of spite. Converted all my gmails to other services, like hey.com and tutanota, I PAY a search engine now Kagi.com.
+1 for Kagi. $9/month is well worth every dime, considering that searching is one of my main workflows. Google search results nowadays are full of rubbish—ads and SEO-boost junk articles.
+1 for ddg, it does everything needed from a search engine without the extra crap, and even if you don't turn off ads, they're reasonable and unobtrusive (and they let you turn them off very easily)
Lemmy is a poor choice for astroturfing, not because of small user count but because no one here is going to hesitate from removing their content or banning them from the site. On regular social media you can act like a shill and get downvoted and hated on, but here the punishments are actually handed out, and even if their home instance doesn't ban them others likely will, effectively crippling said campaign.
These campaigns work on social media services that will protect them due to corporate interest, something that basically doesn't happen here.