Sphere

The simple fact is that YouTube just isn’t good enough to pay the amount of money for that Google wants for it. Accordingly, if other ways to use it besides premium aren’t available, I’ll stop using it and recover some time in my day.

I always just turn DRM off and don’t subscribe to these things… Now I know I had a better reason than I thought I did.

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The alternative exists, but it costs money. Most big YouTuber accounts (at least the ones I’m subscribed to) post on either Nebula, Patreon or some platform like that. It would cost quite a lot to subscribe to them all, but still less than YouTube premium in my country. So in the worst case scenario where YouTube really blocks all ad free interfaces except paid use, that’s my answer. I don’t like it as I think a lot of the content is overpriced for what it is, but it’s better than having $$$ swallowed up by some mega corporation that is just interested in screwing authors and viewers over as much as possible.

Web environment integrity is a non-starter because it offers avenues for bad actors to enforce “integrity” that forces malware to be loaded as well as legitimate page elements. However, that doesn’t mean Google won’t keep trying to stop ad blockers, alternative interfaces etc in the future.

Some of the best deals on Low End Box come in a fair bit cheaper than that. Not so long ago there were truly low-end deals on OpenVZ in the realm of $1-$2 per month, and I’ve seen Racknerd servers for $20 a year. If you’re going to pay $5/mo you could get Linode/Akamai, Digital Ocean, Vultr, etc. It all depends what you want specs-wise and what your risk appetite is - the lower-end / newer players might be less reliable than the more established ones, use older hardware, or have additional AUP restrictions on them. It’s a matter of matching your needs carefully with what you are buying.

I tried putting up SearX and NextCloud, without really having used any equivalent cloud services in the past… but eventually both came unstuck, because:

• SearX ended up getting blocked by basically every search engine, even though it was a private instance and only I was using it. And even while it worked, the results were not much better than using some other engine like Brave Search or even Startpage. Also, being the only user on that IP, meant that I was still able to be tracked by Google and filter bubbles started being an issue.
• NextCloud - just wasn’t a need for it. I initially used the RSS reader and email and a few other things, but I already have a good desktop email client and RSS reader and preferred to use them, and other services I just wasn’t that interested in. No point putting in the effort maintaining it if I’m not using it.

These were personal instances though. Maybe might have been more successful if I’d had a userbase to serve, who actually were interested in having things web-based and were not so concerned about the inevitable loss in performance compared to desktop apps.