There’s only like, one viable instance though: inv.nadeko.net.

A RISC-V equivalent might be better in terms of hardware openness.

Invidious mainly, and that doesn’t use any YT accounts, it’s the equivalent of watching YT logged out.

Also, Grayjay lets you log in through it but that probably doesn’t bypass the age check if you’re KYC’d.

If you’re an active creator yourself though or even if you only have a few vids you made years ago that are still up, I’d set up PeerTube, Odysee, or both, and post those there while you still can, though.

One more reason to use an alt front-end, and clear/disable your watch/view history and not log into YT directly anymore, at least while you still can.

I wonder if history will repeat with PCs, and especially handheld PCs, a market which the Steam Deck effectively sparked into life, while Nintendo, PS, and Xbox crash and burn should there be a second Video Game Crash any time soon.

Because all three of the current console vendors aren’t doing great at all, in fact Xbox is basically already dead and even the Switch 2 seems DOA as far as exclusives go and it’s very much maligned by the press atm, while PC seems to be doing fine comparatively especially considering the success of the Steam Deck and the other PC handhelds which followed it.

You can always roll your own instance if you have the hardware to spare. I don’t recommend hosting on a VPS as that defeats the purpose of self-hosting as you’re hosting on someone else’s computer at the end of the day and that’s no different than signing up for an existing public instance and posting there, other than you’re paying for that VPS.

One more step towards the US becoming an NK clone. This is a good opportunity for Loops to advertise themselves as the anti-Tiktok.

Well, given git is decentralized and self-hostable…

CDs still do that to some extent, especially with indie releases, and also higher-end physical formats like SACD and DVD-Audio tend to have a lot of extras packed in with them as they’re typically considered to be special editions of a given album, but both SACD and DVD-Audio are DRM-encumbered unlike normal CDs and of course analog formats where DRM doesn’t apply, so trying to get them on a PC will be harder if not impossible especially as the DSD codec that SACD uses has particularly nasty DRM shipped with it IIRC.

There’s also true novelty formats like MD, DCC, or even in the case of Jeremy Heiden’s Blue Wicked, Elcaset of all things, and Blue Wicked was legit the first album to ever be released on that format, 40+ years after it faded from public consciousness.

Not good, not good at all. In fact, I can imagine this trend backfiring in the worst way possible when ChatGPT or other LLMs encourage people who were on the verge of snapping to finally snap and commit horrible acts, instead of bringing them back from the brink like some form of actual therapy would ideally do.

Like, any form of legitimate outlet is better than taking your issues out on an LLM that will more likely than not just make things worse.

You got LibreOffice? You got a digital diary you can write into, for example. Got some basic art/craft supplies? There’s an other legit outlet to put your feelings into right there (and bonus points for more of a physical outlet for clay), and you get the idea. Even without actually going to seek professional help, you likely have plenty of legitimate outlets to turn to within easy reach which aren’t LLMs.

One more reason if you’re still buying music, to start buying physical albums again while you still can.

CDs aren’t age-gated and you can rip them to FLAC yourself. Vinyl also isn’t age-gated because it’s analog, and although it’s a longer and more drawn-out process than just ripping a CD which will only take a few minutes as because vinyl is an analog format, you gotta record it in real-time, and then manually split the raw waveform up into separate tracks, manually input metadata, and manually generate a cuesheet from the split-up tracks before finally exporting*, you can still needle-drop LPs to FLAC as well.

*This isn’t as big an issue with 78s, 45s, and EPs (which are 33-1/3rpm singles last time I thought) as it is with LPs as there isn’t as much playback time on them, and at least 45s and EPs are singles rather than a full album like with LPs so you only have one song per side, and I assume 78s are singles as well, as 78s max out at 5min per side.

It’s fine right now still, but given it’s a centralized, corporate-run platform at the end of the day, I’m skeptical of its long-term prospects; what’s stopping the guys in charge of that platform from going turncoat and turning it fully into Twitter 2.0?

Mastodon by contrast of being an open, decentralized platform, has some immunity against the enshittification that will inevitably ruin any centralized platform.

Loose mainboards don’t ship with an OS by default and typically ship with SecureBoot disabled by default as well, it would be pretty hard to force an OS on something that has no OS installed by default unless it’s forced in ROM.

Although, I suppose lose PC parts could simply be banned and custom PC builds could be criminalized, and only completely soldered-down prebuilts could be legally allowed to be sold in their borders with force-enabled SecureBoot and Pluton blocking non-Windows OSes.

…Right as the EU is trying to get away from Windows for their government stuff.

Forcing SecureBoot platform-wide would kill the loose PC parts market.

Except that would require a rewrite of the PC spec which I’m not sure would work out too well given the existence of loose mainboards for custom builds which ship with no OS by default and expect you to supply the OS yourself, ditto for niche manufacturers like Framework who also offer the option of letting you supply your own OS.

Good luck applying this sorta lockdown to PCs.

Or self-host if that’s feasible, MAS has been self-hosting for a while now, for example.

Anyone who has projects on Github they care about, you might wanna move it to self-hosting or another git host while you still can, because once MS gets tired of killing e-mails, Github repos are probably going to start getting sniped next.

Hopefully Google doesn’t bypass that and record your history to guess your age regardless.

In fact, Google probably still records your view and search history even if you turn those off, and turning off view and search history probably just blocks it from getting added to the recommendation algorithm.

Basically, the best course of action, while it still is a course of action, is to just watch YT either on one of the few Invidious instances left standing, or on Grayjay, but still, purge your search and view history and disable it moving forward for added peace of mind if anything.

Better yet would be to straight-up log out of YT on your browser and only watch YT in Invidious or logged in on Grayjay moving forward.

How long before that extends to PCs and non-Windows OSes are blocked? Also, add non-Chrome browsers to that as well (that includes Edge, Chromium, Brave, etc. as well as Firefox and its forks).