I went with Mint because my technical knowledge of Linux is very basic at the moment. I imagine I'll jump to a more hands-on distro as my familiarity with it increases. EndeavorOS looks interesting.

This is the advantage of decentralization over federation. IMHO the fact that Lemmy is only federated really hurts it. Not so much for user accounts (in theory these can be backed up restored and moved. Not ideal but not awful) but in that communities are tied to servers. When the server a community is on goes away it is hugely damaging to that community.

I think we live in a time period where seizing/searching phones doesn't need the physical device to be present. They just have to ask Google and Meta to do it for them. Different than literally combing through the memory on the device, but not much. It's why FOSS and selfhosting matters so much. What Google and Meta don't have, they can't just take. That being said I would bring a burner if I went to the US. Lord knows I have said more than my fair share of critical things about the US government lol

You look up what Googlebot does. No AI. You want to know what crawlers do AI? Just search for "AI", or "training", or some such, or skim through. It's not long. Google-Extended collects training data. Note that Google-Extended is explicitly not used to rank pages. Did that help?

The endgame is stuff as much money into one's own pocket. That's it.

I appreciate that! I’m in the states unfortunately

I certainly hope so! Human ingenuity has gotton us here. I'm interacting with you across who knows how much distance, using a handheld device that folds up. .....but, just because we've gotten ahead of trouble and found solutions thus far, doesn't mean that an unintended bit of code, or hardware fault, or lack of imagination can't cause consequences further down the road. I appreciate your optimism and pragmatic understanding. You seem to be a solution driven person that believes in our ability to reason and fix things. We'll definitely need that type of attitude and approach when and if something goes sideways.