But how does a VPN prevent those things?

It doesn’t, at least not for the average user. It might prevent your ISP from looking at your traffic, but modern networks are far better in that regard with encrypted SSL traffic and DNS than it used to be.

A VPN is just someone else’s Internet connection. The average person does not get any benefits.

I think that’s the overall goal. Much harder to block ads and they can collect a ton more data.

It’s what made me finally check out lemmy.

That would be nice, but not likely to happen. It would be difficult once they are merged.

We don’t have a functioning government. If we did this wouldn’t be allowed along with the other massive consolidations going on.

I second XMPP. Conversations is great and its really easy to host your own prosody server.