Invidious still wotks great for me.
There's also Piped.
Peertube is also gaining traction and I personally enjoy that, just needs more content creators to stop worrying about chicken and egg and start protecting their content.
As someone that watches Twitch through MPV, I can confirm watching "Ad Playing" is preferable to actually watching an annoying ad.
Trying to crosspost.
According to OSM, they're complementary and they kind of work together:
Use tech and services outside the big tech. Just Fedi over standard social. Use Peertube instead of Youtube.
Run Firefox.
Set up your own servers for yourself or start a community. Matrix, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.
Run SearXNG as your search or help others by hosting.
If you can work of free and open source code that helps decentralize and give the power back to the people or create something new. Even if you can code, learning a project and helping others with it or helping create docs, etc.
Spread the word, but don't be annoying. Help less technical folks get decentralized.
It's very difficult and can be disheartening, but you don't have to cold turkey all of it. Each drip in the bucket helps until we're all united and become a tidal wave.
When all the power is centralized that's when those central players think they can do whatever they want.
This is the part that caught my attention:
Privacy features like user-agent reduction, IP reduction, preventing cross-site storage, and fingerprint randomization make it more difficult to distinguish or reidentify individual clients, which is great for privacy, but makes fighting fraud more difficult.
And we do those things, not because we're fraudsters, but because we're trying to protect ourselves from the likez of YOU!
YOU did this, change your model and maybe it'll be better? Oh! But! Mooooooooney! I forgot. Stupid me.
This is the fucking bully telling the nerd that if he doesn't just HAND OVER his lunch money, that he'll get beat. It's YOUR fault! Not OURS!
Edit: Formatting and added about bully
Edit 2: fixing the formatting of the formatting edit. :-D lol
Please NEVER stop asking questions. As other have said, there really are no stupid questions.
If someone else acts like it's a stupid question, then it's their issue and not yours. NOTHING is easy until you understand it. The only way to understand it is to ask questions.
I've told numerous folks at work that before they do something if they have a question then let me know, because I'd rather answer a question then spend an hour or more fixing something broken.
I ask a LOT of questions. So many questions that when I first started in IT I had a lead that got used to me being in the office 2 hours before him so he knew I'd have a million questions and before he'd even go to his desk he'd stop by mine and ask if I had questions, which I always did.
Please please please please please ASK QUESTIONS.
I have been in IT for 12 years now, I have been on Linux for 16. Before this post I literally was in another thread and asked about BTRFS. I looked it up and it wasn't making sense to me, so I asked a question. You can NEVER know EVERYTHING. And when you start to get comfortable that's when something new comes out or you start digging deeper and have more.
Mother-in-law works at one. Under educated, under paid, not enough help, everyone is forced to go there and sees it as a watse of their time so the "guv'ment" can "steal" your hard earned money. At least in thd US.
NO! No bugs! Be perfect!
Seriously though, I've seen way dumber shit in "production" ready code.
I won't use Bluesky, but this happens all the time. I also don't see the issue.
I've told folks before, once and last time in front of developers (they didn't find it funny) , that all code is shit. Not because they're bad at it, but because it's impossible to account for EVERY possible factor. They always make a better idiot. US: "Here's this square." Them: "I cut the corners off to fit it into the round hole and it no works!"
"In essence, the accuracy is entirely dependent on the difficulty of the test."
AKA doesn't work for shit. Don't bother with it. And even if it did work, it'll be an arms race and right now the deepfakes have the nuke and Intel has a musket.
Peertube has RSS. I hope this pushes folks to Peertube. I personally recommend and love TILVids. You can set up an account on TILVIDs and even follow folks on other instances. Or spin up your own Peertube if you're brave enough, I could never figure it out but I plan on trying again some day. :D aNot that I want the alt-right stuff, but if they go on their own server everywhere else just DeFederates them and I never have to see it.
But yeah, LBRY was all in on the Crypto BS. Honestly kind of hoping this is just the tip of the iceberg for the crypto companies playing in the arena.
I've been around long enough to see many projects be extinguished.
To your first point, these companies essentially have infinite money compared to you, me, everyone combined on Mastodon. They can and will figure out a way to track you across servers and they will figure out how to exploit that. Cookies weren't supposed to be used for tracking they way they are, but the money hoarders figured out how to exploit them. Browser fingerprinting wasn't a thing, but it can now be used to track you. How you type and how you speak online can be used to ID you.
If you think that Facebook is willing to share anything, I just don't agree. Facebook will create Threads, they'll put it on the Fediverse, they'll align, then eventually they'll start building features that Mastodon, Lemmy, etc refuse to or literally can't or won't have the time to do, and then they'll start selling how they're so much better and you should come join them, or they'll say they're more secure, or they'll just smear the others. People will flock to the new and better, because hey it's still on the Fediverse and open, eventually they'll close it off and strangle the life out of the Fediverse. I'll still be on the Fediverse, but these platforms are all about content. If people stop showing up, they can still exist, but they're basically useless. It's happened before, it'll happen again.
At this point just get a rasbperry pi, or some similar device, and run it as a regular computer. Firefox, ublock origin, don't worry about ads, and turn it into a machine that is capable of soooooooo much more. Hell, any PC will work. Steam Deck, NUC, that old laptop you have laying around? Been running little NUCs on my TVs for years and so happy I don't have to put up with that nonsense.