sigh
The Brave browser is based on Chromium. Using it to get away from chrome does very little. Different browser, same engine.
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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Microblog Memes
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A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
- Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
- Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
- You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
- Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
- Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
- Absolutely no NSFL content.
- Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
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It has less telemetry surely?
It's also got a MAGA guy as the CEO though, and he's a homophobic anti-vaxxer
Yes. Less, but not zero. You're still tied into Google's ecosystem. Brave is basically Chrome with a few privacy settings enabled by default.
FireFox on the other hand is completely independent from Google, and more tweakable.
If you absolutely have to use a Chromium browser for some reason it's not the worst choice. But they're pretty shady.
YSK with termux you can run yt-dlp on your phone
I don't see it here but the top comment on reddit for this post was that:
If you have a VPN with a server in Albania to switch to that because serving Ads during streaming is illegal there. I have yet to test it but sounds legit and no one was nay saying it.
Holy shit it does seem to work, just tried it on my phone with the yt app and I didn't get a preroll ad
This is the way. Bonus points if your VPN does split tunnelling, so you don't have to mess around turning it on and off.
It does work. Also doesnt prompt me ti signin before videos play.
STOP USING YOUTUBE. USE PEER TUBE.
If you are a content creator; especially a new creator, make peertube your default.
I'd love to see PeerTube get more use, but the one issue for creators is monetization. I don't really see a great way for creators to make a decent income through PeerTube. We all hate the ads, but... That's where a lot of their money comes from. Without a solution to that, creators are never going to embrace it, unfortunately.
There is buycoffie site to give donation to creators. Many yt creators dont get much money from yt ads cause they get demonetisation frequently.
But do things like that actually translate into respectable revenue? I understand that there are technically ways to get paid, but they only matter to creators if they actually fill their pockets.
The problem is nobody is crazy enough to host these much videos other than Google. Google wants to stay as a monopoly in long-form video sharing platforms and I don't think Google is actually making much money in return comparing the cost if Petabytes of video files getting uploaded all the time.
Even after keeping a huge chunk of money that they get from advertisers, I still don't think it's that profitable but Somany people use YouTube and - they get to also stalk our online activity and do god knows what with allaaat data.
That's a big part of what PeerTube tries to address. Yes, the videos still must be hosted somewhere, but PeerTube streams the video as a torrent where the host is the tracker and guaranteed seed while every client streaming the video is a torrent client that shares what it already has with every other active stream to reduce demand on the host. It's not a perfect solution since the host must act as a guaranteed seeder, but for popular videos actively being streamed by many people at once, it has the potential to massively reduce traffic for those streams.
For less popular videos that may not have more than one viewer in any given moment, though, there's likely no real impact. If it got some more development interest, I could see it getting archival clients that behave sort of like an *Arr server for media management, allowing users to save their favorite videos in exchange for acting as an extra seed over some longer term. That'd help, but it's definitely not a full solution.
One shitty thing they've done that you can't get around with these methods is the new "1080p Enhanced Bitrate". I'm not going to pay for premium just to prove that, but 99.9% sure that on many videos added before this was introduced (that it was added to) they've degraded the base 1080p and the original is probably behind the new setting.
I hope I'm not right, but something tells me that the way it's going, at one point they'll only have 720p for non-premium.
Why do y'all go with the absolute worst options to avoid YT ads?
Use NewPipe on Android. Use FreeTube on PC. Failing all those, use an invidious instance from any web browser that isn't fucking Brave - I recommend inv.nadeko.net.
What's wrong with Brave?
They keep doing shady shit. I was a Brave defender until I read all of that. At the end of the day, there is no shortage is Chromium browsers, so I might as well use one that doesn't have this sketchy history. Like Ungoogled Chromium.
For downloading on Android, i'd recommend Seal. It uses yt-dlp https://f-droid.org/packages/com.junkfood.seal/
YouTube Search Fixer is also a must have extension. It removes all the bullshit yt is trying to feed you.
MPV too
What about Grayjay? Haven't seen that mentioned.
I forgot I had it installed. Pulls yt videos without delay, without ads.
I do have a vpn so could pop off to Albania but I'm unsure of there's less revenue for yt by using grayjay?
Pinchflat into your media server and watch them later. Done.
Just dragndrop videos into mpv
Revanced
Vanilla Firefox?
they lost me at Brave.
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