You still have alternative platforms to Big Tech though, PeerTube and Odysee like have been mentioned umpteen times in this thread and on Lemmy at large, and not to mention Lemmy itself, and Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Bsky among others.

I removed myself out and pay for the family plan, but I have a good reason.

My dad watches YT almost exclusively so I told him if he shared his password with me I can add him to my plan so he doesn’t see any ads. He fell for it. Now I login into his account ever so often and mark “not interested” on any red pill bullshit I see. It seems to be working.

Reminds me of when people say "product" instead of "shampoo" or "conditioner" or whatever it is they're actually putting in their hair. Capitalism-coded language.

Vinegar works really well, and hasn't been affected by this change: https://apps.apple.com/au/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303229

I don't think Brave has any special magic that other browsers don't.

My understanding is, all the workarounds in use recently work or fail depending on the IP address you have.

I don't know anything about this change but it seems to simply require a JS engine in your client. Any browser has that, so the browser addons probably aren't effected by this change.

However, it's clear that YT is waging an incremental campaign here. Today it's yt-dlp, next week... who knows.

I don't know about the OP, but Google admitted recently to breaking the open web. By their own admission, and their own words, Google is against an open web. https://lemmy.org/post/1689081

on the scale of YouTube

That's precisely the trick. Don't try to copy Youtube. You're gonna lose. And it's not the Peertube intended use case anyway.

Instead, Peertube and other such platforms should work as cross-indexing domain-specific, configuration-specific video galleries. A retro videogame video archive does not need 4K 120fps Dobly 14.3 audio; they can just encode most of everything in 480i 30fps and their storage costs will go down significantly. A news report / news reel archive can save some costs by encoding as SDR (or even lower) with ~80kbps mono MP3 audio or somesuch, since most of everything past the intro jingle is human voice.

Play to your advantages. Trying to break into a monopoly game where the rules are broken, the only other player is broken, and the entry fees are broken is self-defeating.

Rip my preferred downloader I guess, new version that would update is subscription based.