It is complicated. I follow almost 500 accounts often producing 50 toots per hour. Nobody should spend that much time to catch up with all. My coping tools are:

• Making lists, including one for important accounts I don’t want to miss. Sadly I cant find a way to get notifications for those.

• Resisting FOMO. Remember, mastodon is people-centric, not topic-centric like Lemmy. I don’t try to use it as news source or catch all hashtags I care of. Just treat it as a space to casually look what people are talking about.

In general I think that backlash against algorithms went the wrong way. We poured the baby with the water. We should have resisted their harmful use, lack of transparency and user control, rather than the very idea. Controlling what content shows up first and setting your priorities is a good thing. Users should have this power, not corporations and not even admins.

For me it is not so much about personal privacy, as against concentration of power.

Insane money combined with capacity of invisible, precise manipulation of mass information is really hurting democracies. Big tech is already richer than most countries, and their negative influence is more visible than ever. So now we, who believe in democratic principles, have to vote not only with ballots, but also with our choices and our conscious attention. The least we can do is resist this concentration of power on personal level. Ideally - do it together.

I used it for a few years on Oneplus Nord, and a few days ago switched to pixel7 with LineageOS. First impressions are that e/os was much more usable out of the box.

I surely have worse experience with banking: Revolut and SmartID app just refuse to work due to rooted phone (worked well on e/os). Other bank app is somewhat more broken - on e/os it didnt fully load but at least showed notificatioms on each transaction, now doesnt and is useless.
Could be due to newer android version on LineageOS though, I didnt investigate that.

Kagi uses russian Yandex and pretend it is neutral “business as usual”:

https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integration-due-to-the-geopolitical-status-quo

I used e/os by Murena for a few years already on my Oneplus Nord. Except for banking and some google stuff it works really well. Now that phone is almost dead, and I plan to switch to Pixel 7 pro and probably LineageOS.

I would expect murena’s homebrew phones to be lower class, so if you dont want to flash/install OS yourself, you can also get a refurbished pixel 7 : https://murena.com/shop/smartphones/premium-refurbished/murena-pixel-7-refurbished/