Honestly, essentials shouldn’t be (majority) privately owned. This includes water, sewage, electricity, most roads, and internet.

To me, as the cables in the US are privately owned it seems that unless you “luck out”, you essentially have 1 realistic option for internet. I’ve been told that it’s fairly regional, so apparently it’s not so bad in the major cities.

In ~99% of NZ the internet (fibre) cables are either crown-company owned (essentially state), or joint owned by private/public. This essentially makes EVERY ISP buy their bandwidth off the cable owner. There is no ISP monopoly (only a physical cable monopoly), and just like power companies, changing ISP’s is trivial. I think a lot of europe does something similar too, and apparently some cities in the US do this too.

Blocking (and subscribing) communities seems to be occasionally broken?

I usually just use KeePassXC, which is open source and self hosted (kinda). It’s synced over onedrive, though something like syncthing would work fine too.

No backups per-se, but onedrive should handle accidentally deleted files, and the database is on a few machines anyway so the chances of anything permanently happening to all copies are rather slim.