If you can’t migrate something and must therefore keep it, if I may suggest, keep it logged in to some old phone with busted battery you only access sporadically.

Post sounds either like an ad piece, the bullet points of a sales pitch, or a LLM summary.

Maybe faking the user agent would help? There are extensions for reporting to sites you are using different browsers.

Alternatively, if you don’t want the browser to monitor everything in the PC, maybe install on a virtual machine?

Proton and Tutamail are both nice imo.

Agreed.

Some also argue dislikes are used for censoring, but I’d conter-argue that dissidence is a form of opinion. If people are using the tool illegitimately, it doesn’t make the tool itself illegitimate. Rather, investigating suspicious behaviour, of which there are tools one can use on Youtube, should be the way.

And I’d further say the removal hurts not just the content creators, but their followers too. If the creator uses likes ratio as a quality assurance metric, or to know what they should or shouldn’t focus on, the lack of the metric will make the service he/she provides worsen, and by extension the experience of their followers.

I’d say Youtube is a case of lack of competition making an oligopoly. And sadly for quite a few matters, it’s still the “least worse” option.

Still, I’d urge to people, though I know it’s an uphill battle, to at least keep alternatives at hand.

I think they’re going for the former in slow steps, so the impact is not as quickly noticed.

I feel like there’s an additional intent there. Short bursts of dopamine in quick succession are a pretty addicting drug, and thus making people more distracted and sedated, and if they don’t have ADHD, they may get the same focus troubles people with ADHD have.

If you must consume those, I strongly advise to at least redirect to places autoplay or replay isn’t triggered. In Youtube’s case, there are browser plugins for redirecting, yt-dlp, mobile and PC players, etc.

And expanding a bit, since it’s not a problem exclusive to Google…

For TikTok and Odysee, I don’t consume their short-format videos so can’t comment on those. And for Loops, part of the fediverse, watching externally, e.g. on Mastodon, should give the video in a plain form, without the addicting features.

If I may suggest, already start finding alternatives where those you follow are. Helps with both timeouts, and at making less painful to stop using Youtube altogether if/when the need comes.

Paying for whatever you find worthwhile, but in the scope of the original question, for services that pose as alternatives of Youtube.

Also interesting, wasn’t aware of Odysee being open source. Living and learning!

Imo, one form of investment anyone can do is adoption. No use being the best option available if no one uses it. And Peertube channels are treated as communities on Lemmy/PieFed, have native RSS, and Grayjay and the *Pipe apps have integrations for it, so plenty of ways to follow. Then as adoption grows, so does relevance, and the more relevance there is, the higher is the chance is for people with the perfect alignment of interest, skills and time to improve the engine to appear.

Direct financial investment also helps, though that grows expensive fast, so worth being careful not to overspend in supporting. And as the local saying goes, if something is free, you are the product, which helps being ever more suspicious of how platforms like Youtube stay afloat indeed. So the better option, for those willing to support with money, is also to go slow and steady.

On a last note, Odysee’s open source? Never heard of that.

Directly, I don’t think so. Youtube letting anyone join in, and generally being free to use, are the opposite of what Nebula does. Closest to Youtube afaik are Peertube, Odysee, Rumble and Bitchute. Other platforms come to mind but imo it starts getting a bit too small/niche at this point.

Nebula, and Dropout if I may add, from what I understand and checked, would be closer to cable TV, or Netflix and the sort if they were more generalist (or let their creators be). Still, subscribing to both, I think the two are worth to have around.

Now, on tangent, but still in the scope of escaping Youtube, from my experience, it is something hard to achieve. Constantly seeking redundancy for what I follow, still about half the video channels are Youtube-only, and jumping across sites only helps to annoy and want to stay at a single place (imo the intended experience from what I call the “2010’s sites”).

To avoid this annoyance, if you can, I’d suggest trying to aggregate all alternatives in a single place, like RSS readers, Grayjay/NewPipe/PipePipe, here at the fediverse through tracking bots, Peertube channels being treated as communities, etc., and/or other aggregators you may find. Helps at easing the process and not be annoyed into submission sticking to the more overarching platform.

@gatitaQwQ@mastodon.social pois, eles tiveram décadas para ganhar hegemonia. E qualquer reversão é demorada e desgastante, sendo fácil de se pensar que é um esforço inútil até que resultados enfim comecem a aparecer. Paciência e resiliência são necessárias para tirar da própria vida uma presença constante como essa. Também é interessante, creio eu, buscar concientizar outras pessoas, buscar alternativas, reverter leis feitas em prol do Google (ou do que ele representa) ao invés da população, e por aí vai para “desmerdificar” o que o Google e outros na mesma linha estragaram.

In English:

[OP] So annoying that you try to abandon Google but half the apps have trackers and everything’s connected to Google sites you visit, Google kinda controls everything people do. Even changing the OS in your phone, Google is always watching us.

[my reply] yeah, they had decades to achieve hegemony. Any reversion is slow and tiring, being easy to think it’s a vain effort until results finally start appearing. Patience and resilience are needed to remove such looming presence from your life. It’s also interesting, I’d argue, to seek to make other people aware of Google’s problems, to seek alternatives to it, to revert laws made for the sake of Google or what it represents instead of being for the population, and so on to “deshittify” what Google and related made worse.

!demeta@programming.dev crosspost candidate =)

Probably not far? I’d look into some LLM that can run commands with API, hook it to some web search API, and then work on the results.

Someone I follow would say, and paraphrasing because I don’t have photographic memory, if you keep looking downwards, you may say with confidence that you are in soil and that it doesn’t end because that’s what you see, but someone else looking forward is able to see where both are going. (Diogo Forjaz the guy I am paraphrasing)

But to reach a decent outcome, one actively needs to raise his/her head and seek the best path visible.

And these I’d say are problems being built up for at least a century, but knowing the problem being the first step to change it, awareness has never been higher, the reversion taking off in only 20~30 years.

But to those that benefit from these problems, they are likely setting up so once one agenda falls, they have a new agenda they parasite. And the next one apparently is already taking form, which is still somewhat nebulous to me, but with some patterns already taking form.

One pattern is old actually, to make people have an immediate and panicked reaction to a new problem each week. So first, the better course of actions is to calm down, evaluate how bad things really are and not how they seem to be, evaluate what would be a good outcome (and if you aren’t defending a problematic outcome without knowing), and evaluate how to get to such a good outcome.

Without having watched it, I’ll guess stopping it goes in the line of “little by little, but growing ever more independant from it”.

@TankieTanuki@hexbear.net there’s that Australian one Louis Rossmann had found but that I always forget the name. There’s Preservetube for Youtube videos. And one could argue RSS bots here on the fediverse are a partial form of archival, since they pull the title, some times the context from the blurb, and the link to show at least that it existed (also yet to find a bot post from a dead instance to test if they can be propagated after the instance ceases fo be).

Other than those, not familiar with any, sadly.

Article is rather leghty, so would help pointing the exact problems.

But taking the liberty to try to sift through it myself, from the History section up to the 30 October 2025 situation, nothing sounds conclusive to me.

The French government and CP situation sounds like a grey area - if I understood it right, the French gov. tried to take the contents down without due process?

If that’s the case, I could conjecture the demand was made as part of the internet censorship agenda, where laws and decisions made would induce content hosters to preemptively censor theirs users to avoid massive fines. And usually such agendas advance in the points it’s harder to criticize first to get normalized.

But if it was the due process and I didn’t understand the French legal jargons, then shitty move on Archive.Today’s side.

About the ongoing 2026 situations, those were pretty shitty moves, yeah, and worth being careful at best around the platform.

There’s Loops if you also want ActivityPub compatibity.