I love FF. It's fantastic on macOS and the customization beats every single other browser out of the water. BUT, and I know this is controversial, and I know the foundation is not the same as those who manage the browser, after the events on the capitol they released and statements saying something like "deplatforming is not enough" and even though I asked several times, I could never get a confirmation from anyone within the Mozilla Foundation assuring me they would never use telemetry data to spy on "undesirables" or that they would never try to block content they deemed harmful.
I get the situation is different, but my parents escaped from two civil wars in Central America in the 70s and the stories they told me about political persecution were scary enough to make me distrust organizations that don't seem to understand nuance when it comes to politics.
I certainly can't offer any official word, but telemetry doesn't have enough data to spy on anyone, and the privacy policy spells this out pretty clearly. And if something snuck in, it's all open source and I imagine people would raise a big stink pretty quickly (whatever their political leanings were).
I remember that post, and I think you're mischaracterizing it. The point wasn't that "deplatforming is a good start, but we need to go even farther"; it was "deplatforming is not the right solution, we need something better".
As for trying to block harmful content -- Mozilla is already doing that, all the time, so you're certainly not going to get any promise there. Firefox blocks malware, sites with expired/mismatching certificates, things on the (un)safe browsing list, 3rd party cookies in some configurations, etc. Whether any of those constitute censorship is up for you to decide. Right now, it feels fine to me, but I agree that there's reason for concern. All the browsers have all the mechanisms necessary for censorship, and there's no way to crisply define "harmful".
I feel very much the same way. I don't particularly like the direction Mozilla has taken, both in terms of current day politics and the "resignation" Brendan Eich. Granted, it's part and parcel with today's mainstream, but that blog post they published last year was kind of chilling IMO. Their statement was totally out of the bounds of what Mozilla should be responsible for.
I still use Firefox not only because the browser is not necessarily the same as the foundation, but the alternatives are organizations with far, far worse track records. (putting aside the advantages I mentioned)
I thought the super secret internet clubs era was over. How old are you? Most people on voat cross browse. There's even a plugin to put both aggregators in the same page. I don't get where this idea that voat is that "den of pedos and fat haters" is coming from.
Holy shit, of all the subs you could've mentioned. SRD is incredibly biased in certain topics, they ALWAYS brigade the subs they are against, and have the most awful crowd of the site. Seriously, the whole metasphere is incredibly toxic.
Shadowbans are abused all the time in Reddit, for example. Not the sitewide sbans, but the ones done using AutoModerator, where they delete your comment with no warning, and you don't find out because you still see your own comments.
/r/Games for instance, has a policy of arbitrary banning people this way.
I get the situation is different, but my parents escaped from two civil wars in Central America in the 70s and the stories they told me about political persecution were scary enough to make me distrust organizations that don't seem to understand nuance when it comes to politics.