Check out !worldnews@lemmit.online. The admin of lemmit.online has set up a bot that fetches reddit posts via RSS, making it much easier to make the switch and of course not getting any ads.
You can make requests for subs to fetch at !requests@lemmit.online.
In the end we’re just using lemmy and lemmit’s bot as a simple RSS reader, so nothing illegal or even remotely unethical happening here.
DDG is better overall than google but once in a while I encounter a search it totally fails to be useful on and I have to resort to Alphabet Inc.