This is just a news article. Also even though they had those informations in the article I won’t trust some journalist about the answers of your big questions and I suggest you the same.

That’s only true for US.

I hated being forced to use Reddit. If we consider the situation of search engines today we need Reddit’s results in some areas. Addons like LibRedirect and projects like this are really needed. Thank you!

Stop using Chrome already.

There is an account called Fedi Follows on Mastodon that shares accounts according to their topics. Hope it helps.