coughrelief

Pirate it and get a better experience without their awful launcher

Adding to this, what would be the best way to store videos, pictures and music over a long period of time?

Ublock has it built in

Soulseek and donating to the artists you wanna support or buying merch

Searx sucks for images in my experience, startpage was bought by an advertising company, brave is weird for a multitude of reasons but I don't know how good their search engine is as I've never tried it

However I do think that finding a searx instance that works for you and then using another engine like ddg for images is the way to go... You could add a shortcut like ".ddg garbage truck" for easily searching with for example ddg on firefox

How do I use the SSL connection?

Maybe a stupid question, do you need to use a vpn when downloading from drunkenslug? Or is it secure to download without one?

No but try MyInsta

Stop supporting wikipedia.

Disroot and posteo

Download your stuff with soulseek, sync them between devices with syncthing