this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2026
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Youtube is about the last Alphabet service I knowingly use (except when someone shares a google doc).
I thought you meant no Youtube at all. I use Freetube and Newpipe almost exclusively.
Peertube too, when the instance I use to follow channels works (the two previous ones closed). It's a pain to subscribe to stuff. Maybe with RSS feeds...
edit: I've been subscribed to Kagi for a while too, maybe going two years. Love it. Wish it was cheaper
I really liked Qwant maps, a good use of OSM, but the idiots closed it...
I meant to say, not directly use their services for video and definitely aim to give them less identifiable information. Like Invidious’s Yewtu.be (https://yewtu.be/) scrapes YouTube and is not reliant on their API (but does give IP addresses to YouTube, hence the use of a VPN), but FreeTube uses YouTube’s API by default I think, but can use Invidious’s scrapping API (https://docs.freetubeapp.io/usage/privacy/). PeerTube is not reliant on YouTube at all and can be a good alternative even though it may have fewer videos (since you use that, then you’ve basically degoogled in that case). Maybe once a month or less I will watch a video from any of those services, so I don’t ever subscribe to any channels. I prefer to read documentation rather over watching videos when possible. To me that is in the spirit of degoogling. Same as I don’t avoid every website that has some script of Google under the hood. But I do block their trackers by activating “No Google” (https://github.com/nickspaargaren/no-google) from time to time if it doesn’t break a website (some website I need to access for work might not load if I have that on) and DuckDuckGo onionized on Tor mostly. I also need to use AlpaFold for work, but fortunately we have an instance that doesn’t go to Google’s servers. They created the protein folding technology and the instance and scripts had to be downloaded at some point from their servers. Degoogling is a fairly complex today. I have been reading more and more about digital cooperativism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_cooperative) and even though something may be open source, as expected, companies can still profit off of it. From the sounds of it, when it comes to cooperativism, no one person controls everything or profits. You may know more about this any how. All that said, giving people more digital privacy and protection is not a technological issue, but more of social issue. Hopefully people get more informed and interested in their digital rights in the future and society moves away from the likes of Google and Meta and Amazon and Apple (and OpenAI) at large.