Also, of course she’s the kind of person to hide that she gave a TEDx talk and not a TED talk until the last possible moment on her website.

That is correct. The public ones get blacklisted by youtube.

to put the “youtube often breaks it” into perspective. In the last 6 months, I’ve lost access to youtube for a total of 8 days, with the longest continuous downtime being 3 days. selfhosting it works fine, for the most part.

I self-host an invidious instance and combine that with sponsorblock. I only ever see the videos from channels I am subscribed to unless I explicitly search for something.

yt-dlp is a good tool for downloading youtube, and there are several GUI frontends built around that

I ran pfSense on proxmox for a few years. It was fine, but unnecessarily complicated. I switched to an Intel n6005 mini PC and I’ll never go back. Having a second device meant I was able to get rid of my Dell R720xd and switch to consumer hardware with no internet downtime. It means if something happens and I have to hard reboot my server, I don’t have to worry about my partner getting booted from a video call. Etc. Etc. The mini PC was under $200. It sips power. It’s silent. It’s a no-brainer.

This is a cool new app that I use to supplement OSM with address metadata that Google has without installing Google Maps: https://sr.ht/~amolith/adresilo/

You could just, you know, not use computer generated images.

Proton also has a VPN

I use Read You for RSS

For WhatsApp and other platforms, I host a Matrix server and add bridges for them.

To replace Google Home, I host a Home Assistant server

For music, you can host your on music streaming service with Navidrome and use an app like Ultrasonic on your phone. If you don’t want to buy music outright, you can get a qobuz subscription and use qobuz-dl to grab music from it.