Concerning Youtube, you may be interested in https://www.invidio.us/ which is an alternative front end. There are also extensions for Firefox which will automatically redirect any Youtube links you happen to come across to open on Invidious.

Invidio.us seems unusable.

I tried to do simplest thing: create playlist - the only thing I'm really missing not having YT account (beside commenting).

1. First of all, it forced me to create Invidio.us account. Why it can't store everything in my cookie?

2. Next, I searched for a video typing its YT code "fVCAFvIq_F8" - no results. After several attempts I figured out that sometimes it does find it and sometimes it doesn't. Weird.

3. Alright, I copied full address of a video into search box, clicked on result - and got an error: "The uploader has not made this video available in your country." Umm... What? I have no problem watching it on YT itself, why would Invidio restrict me? But even if it was country-restricted, why would Invidio reproduce this stupid Google-imposed geographical restrictions/discrimination?

3. Very irritated, I went for another video (OlNC6gK2y0I) - only to get another error: "The media could not be loaded, either because the server or network failed or because the format is not supported" ...

4. It was getting boring, but for the sake of experiment I went for yet another video - Invidio found it and played, but... there is no "Add to a play list" button? Turned out, first you need go to a settings, scroll down, find and click "View all playlists" link, on the next page click "Create playlist" link, on the next page create it, then go back to a video you wanted to add and add it. Thats... a clusterfuck.

5. Alright I go to a front page - where can I see my playlist? Nowhere. You need to find and turn on separate setting just to get "Playlists" link on the front page. (Isn't it obvious that I need playlists from the very fact that I created it?)

OK, maybe at least Invidio has additional functionality compared to YT, like downloading video? No, "Download is disabled." Why?

To all of that I must add that Invidio.us worked very slow, sluggish and unresponsive. Occasionally I was getting "Rate limit exceeded" error just trying to open front page.

Ugh, sounds painful. Luckily my Youtube habbits are only watching videos, so I don't need playlists or other functionality.

I ran into invidio.us as I started using straw-viewer[0] instead of youtube-viewer, and it uses individio.us api key. Didn't know that they had extensions to browsers though!

[0] https://github.com/trizen/straw-viewer

I use the free Freetube application, which uses invidious behind the scenes. Invidious does throw errors sometimes because it gets blocked (or rate limited) by YouTube.

I'm a big fan of Fastmail.

I agree with your point about YouTube. I'll try out the combo you have.

I like YouTube for the videos on there and nothing else. I hate all the ads and how if you watch one video that is off topic from what you usually watch then the algorithm gets messed up and your recommended videos become way different.

Yea, Fastmail rocks! Only problem is that people don't know what it is and and as I don't live in english-speaking country I often have to spell it out.

I should buy "fastmile.com" and use that as an email alias - would solve a lot of problems, lol.

Can you elaborate on the Nextcloud&Syncthing part?

It would be awesome to have LAN local syncing (as Syntching does), while being able to share doc to the outside world (NextCloud's functionality).

Did you figure this out?

Anther topic: yeah, youtube is not something you can replace, but you can still use other frontends, thus the rabbithole recommendation engine doesn't affect you, nor the advertisements. On Android, NewPipe is a great client.

Apologizes from late reply. I have Raspberry Pi running Syncthing on LAN. I share my music, youtube-dl'd videos, podcasts etc. with my phone and laptops through it. Also sometimes I use it to share other documents, code etc. Works also as nice backup as the PI runs rsync with cron to store Syncthing contents to other HDD also.

Nextcloud runs on Digital Ocean droplet and I upload my photos there from phone, store contacts and share larger files with people. Currently Syncthing and Nextcloud do not communicate in anyway.

And yeah, youtube-dl has been lifesaver to escape that "rabbithole recommendation engine" as you awesomely put :D

I use a rpi4 running raspbian and resillio sync (https://www.resilio.com/) for my internal photo backups and data syncing. It also shares outside my local network well but the users need the software installed.

Not OP and not a NextCloud or Syncthing user, but maybe this helps:

https://help.nextcloud.com/t/syncthing-nextcloud-how-to/5459...

Unfortunately I am familiar with this 4 year old answer, yes. I rather hoped there is a better solution since.

My list is: DuckDuckGo, Protonmail (tutanota also an option but want to self-host eventually, rather than switch to another provider), LineageOS (want to get to Linux phone asap, preferably NixOS), OSM, Youtube-dl and container tabs in ff, git, org-mode, qutebrowser and firefox.

Sounds good! What has been your experience with protonmail? I have been looking into NixOS also, but not for phone - are there any ongoing projects? Org-mode is also something I maybe one day learn to use especially if I make the jump into emacs!

What app do you use for osm?

"How I moved out of a house and learned to live in a van down by the river"

Hi. I'm using fastmail (having left Gmail) - can you expand on why you stopped using the calendar?

I don't have anything against fastmail's calendar but I personally also regressed to a paper planner. I just find that I am more engaged with my planning this way, while the digital calendar sorta does its own thing and spits notifications at me for stuff I've forgotten about.

I still use digital for work since it's collaborative but my personal stuff is all inscribed on a dead tree, now.

Exactly this :)