All the people saying "I'll just stop using it, no big loss," are you only using YouTube for fun? Have you never needed to pass a class, prep for a job, work on a house, learn a skill using it?

It is such a large repository of human knowledge that is so far not widely replicated anywhere else. I rely on it for learning skills to provide for my family, as far as learning other useful abilities.

For example, YouTube taught me how to service my own vehicles. I have a specific set of old 90s Volvo cars, and there is a youtuber (Robert DIY) who does an excellent job documenting how to do maintenance on them. I have done my best to archive everything he posts, but he is just an example, as there are countless other informative tutorials and how-tos posted on YouTube.

As of now, Google has their grips on an enormous amount of practically useful data, and they know it. It's beyond fucked, and to act like it is inconsequential or ignorable is very short sighted.

YouTube has so many ads now it's ridiculous. Yesterday YouTube threatened me with the popup even though I have UBlock on Firefox. I've seen 10 ads on a 20 minute video. As if the un-skipabble 2 minute long ads that pause when you switch tabs wasn't bad enough, YouTube is now putting ads in their Premium.

YouTube is in dire need of a big competitor and fast.

I pay money to ride on the bus and still see ads there.

FreeTube is fantastic. I only discovered the concept of YouTube front ends relatively recently and I am not a normie, so the likelihood of normies knowing about front ends is practically zero. Most people think that the only ways to access YouTube content are to go to the website or use the app.

Oh good, I’m not missing out then. I moved around quite a bit between Deezer, Tidal, random piracy in FLAC until finally landing on Apple Music.

I've resorted back to piracy, but mostly cuz my taste in music confuses the hell out of the algorithms: I'm a fan of symphonic metal, and seeding one of those songs as the start of a playlist on something like YT music will land you with a combination of heavy death metal and renaissance fair music.

If I ever find one that can actually distinguish sub-genres of metal, then sign me the fuck up!!

You can mix TIDAL and piracy; I use tidal-dl quite a lot. The problem with streaming services is that they can close shop in five minutes, and all of “your” music won’t be yours anymore.

(I think Apple Music has similar tools.)

What I didn’t like about Tidal was their weird format being advertised as lossless when it wasn’t. It didn’t really sound all that great.

There was an application called requiem (if I remember correctly) that could rip music from older Windows XP versions of iTunes; it was only available over Tor quite some time ago. I’m not sure what people would use these days (maybe just a [modified] DAC?).

TIDAL HiFi is FLAC as far as I know.