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?
I look at youtube sometimes but I don’t have an account on it. yt-dlp worked for me last time I tried (maybe a few weeks ago) though there is a constant cat and mouse game. I guess it stopped working on age gated videos a while back. Other than that, if anything I would say there is too much video about stuff I would prefer to read about.
Yes, for me yt-dlp went from working to error 404 to working to error 403 :/