I was using Ubuntu Touch back when Canonical launched it in partnership with BQ. I still remember how annoyed I was when reddit kept telling me to download the app or continue with “Google Chrome” when I was on Firefox. Those where the days.

Signal may not be the best in a technical sense, but it is good enough and it has the network effect. I’ve been pleasantly surprised when in the span of a few months I met two different people actually in real life, who happened to already be using Signal.

Signal is also just as usable as the big tech alternatives, which makes it not a very hard sell to friends and family. For quite a few years now I have managed to convince everyone I communicate with to do so over Signal. There is no chance I would be as successful with something else.

FreeTube is just a frontend running localy on your machine. It still connects to YouTube in order to fetch the videos, so if your IP gets blocked it will not work either. It is possible to configure FreeTube to use Invidious, but that only works if you find a public instance that still allows API access. I still haven’t found one.

Peertube is an open source self-hostable YouTube alternative. It is great, but only if the creators you follow actually put their videos there. Most creators will just put their stuff on YouTube and not bother with anything else.

As for TankieTube to be honest I’ve never heard of it. From a quick search though it looks like a Peertube instance like many others that you can use if you don’t want to self-host. So, it applies what I said for Peertube.

What I myself do? I self-host a private instance of Invidious of which I am the only user, and then connect to it using Clipious on Android and FreeTube on the desktop. I also keep the server behind a VPN, so I can easily change the IP in case I get blocked. But for quite a few months now I had no such issues. Maybe I got lucky but I use this setup for close to a year and I am pretty happy with it.

Are you serious right now? What do you expect me to do? List you every channel on YouTube that I personally happen to watch, to prove that they don’t post their content anywhere else?

Please give me an example of content that you can’t find anywhere else?

I really dont know what answer you expect on that. It’s no secret that the vast majority of creators only upload their videos on YouTube. Should they mirror them on something like Peertube? Well, yeah, but this is not in your control.

It’s “degoogle”, not “limit google use”… And no, it’s not impossible. What a myth to spread in this forum. :-)

Please answer to me honestly. Do you block all Google related domains on the DNS level including anything related to Google reCaptcha? If yes, please tell me how exactly you are using the web in 2025? And if you don’t, then you are still relying to Google services.

Google has been pretty aggressive with blocking IP addresses of VPNs for quite a while. The only solution is to just try different VPN servers until you find one that works for the time being. Or, you can use Invidious. This instance has been working pretty well for me for quite a few months now.

There is content on YouTube that is not available available anywhere else. Using an alternative frontend with a local account like NewPipe is de-googling to an extend. If that is not de-googling then neither is using something like StartPage for search.

The whole point of de-googling is limiting as much as possible your data exposure to Google. Completely eliminating it is impossible. Unless you are fine with not being able to access the majority of the web due to the use of reCAPCHAv3.

Since this is going to be enforced through Google Services custom ROMs like GrapheneOS will not be affected. Of course if F-Droid no longer exists, that means we lose the largest centralized repository of open source apps which is a huge blow. There are other ways of installing and updating open source apps like Obtainium. But the big thing with F-Droid is that it also provides discoverability.