I stopped using Reddit a few years before the whole stupidity, because the culture was fucking with my head.
Then I did the Mastodons for two years or so, with Lemmy eventually entering the mix. And then as Lemmy got more users and content, it took over as my preferred platform.
Hmm, I don’t know anything about Whoogle, but from other privacy-conscious search engines, I would expect it to work when you use that URL in your bookmark.
Three things I can imagine: