Since you're already in the Fediverse, I'd suggest looking into PeerTube for your videos rather than going to YouTube as your primary platform.

I currently have a channel, but am going to switch to PeerTube when I have my backlog built up again so I can post in a steady schedule. (Workin' on it...) The only things I'm going to put on YouTube are videos going, 'Hey! I have the video up here! Follow the link!' so that people can actually find it and Words of the Week shorts 'cuz I don't want to feed their AI bullshit that I can't get away from with proper stuff and it's just stick figures and rudimentary drawings with words from the dictionary. Unfortunately, it's not as user friendly to search for stuff on PeerTube as it is on YouTube. I'm hoping that gets fixed sooner rather than later. It'll make things better. sigh

I can afford it too, but I won't pay for it on general principle when it costs more than Prime and Tidal combined.

You can skip or avoid ads on YouTube, so meh.
What really grinds my gears though, is the stupid, fucking algorhythm, which routinely offers me videos I just recently watched, vids in languages that I can't speak, "current" affairs stories that are years old, and channels/vids that I have specifically blocked. I curse YouTube daily, but will bless anyone who has a viable alternative....

I have no issues on Firefox or Brave. I never see ads.

I believe you're thinking of premium lite, or whatever they call it.

Open it via Duckduckgo, the player will show it without any ads or tracking.

WHY DONT WE HAVE A MAINSTREAM ALTERNATIVE YET

I guess there's no reason not to post to other sites as well?

I can afford to pay the protection racket, I just choose not to.

There's also Pipeline for *nix (and possibly Windows, but I didn't bother to check.)

We do, but you probably don't like it (TikTok).

You’re right

I meant idk something like Oddysse (but a website with actual moderation)

By operating youtube at a loss for many years Google acted anticompetitively to kill competition or stop competition arising. Now that they've achieved that they can do what they like. Don't feel bad using ad blockers against this anti-capitalist company.

Final stage of enshittification, now they are allowing more right wing propaganda than normal on the channel

Adblocks allow you to not have to skip the ads physically, the algorithm is something else though. Now it starting to push right wing propaganda if your not logged in, and recently they said they are allowing even more now

That is right thinking. I admire that.

Jokes on you, YouTube, my Chinese phone rolls their ads over yours!

Do you know of PeerTube? It's not mainstream at all either, but it seems more known to me.

It's also in the fediverse, and isn't accused of the same moderation issues (though idk if PeerTube is really better than Odyssee at moderation, I suppose it's just a difference in policy).

Edit: I read a bit about it, and I can see I was wrong about Odyssee being less known than PeerTube. It's strange, I never heard of it, but anyway. Odyssee also includes some crypto bullshit, so yeah...

Love libretube but it just wouldn't play videos consistently. Ended up moving to grayjay

You could put the subtitles for videos in languages you don't speak. What was much more annoying to me was the automatic audio translation (it's still available, but it seems YouTube doesn't select it automatically when you watch a video in another language).