With a privacy protecting setup, the mainstream internet is almost unusable. To sign up for social media or even a gmail account, one has to provide a phone number for verification. Youtube doesn’t work when not signed into a Google account, or if one is connected to a VPN. Even downloader programs like yt-dlp and freyr have been rendered useless by the strict access controls of the major platforms. There is a vast amount of community, DIY, and educational material of all sorts behind these platform walls, so how can someone who doesn’t want to be tracked access any of it these days?
There are alternatives like archive.org and peertube which are wonderful but have nowhere near the amount of content that people have been uploading to YouTube over the years. For example, if I need to fix a washing machine and there is a tutorial on YouTube, how can I see it while still preserving a modicum of privacy online?
It depends on what media you’re consuming? Nearly all the media I consume is text based and works without JS. It’s usually available as plain HTML files or markdown files or similar, or in an ebook format like epub or pdf that I can download and read with zathura.
For audio-visual content it’s harder yeah. FreeTube and yt-dlp are working for me with Mullvad VPN as of time of writing. Some invidious instances are still working too. But I hardly ever watch YouTube—I think you may find that you miss YT much less than you’d expect, and if Google makes you pick between privacy and YouTube, you should pick privacy.
Yea, well, I bet you still jerk off manually