Privacy@lemmy.ml: Do you count switching from official YouTube apps to watch YouTube as having "de-googled" from YouTube?
If you quit YouTube then you also quit all the content on YouTube that isn't elsewhere. The best solution if you still want to use it is to use 3rd party apps. Personally I would actually count that as having no reliance on Google in particular anymore. If a video platform owned by Google wasn't the most popular then it would be another platform. I don't think you should think of 3rd party apps as YouTube frontends, but rather, apps that scrape videos hosted on Google's servers.
Sort of. If I'm not logged into google or they can't monetise my data or serve me ads then I feel I have 'de-googled' from a privacy and convenience point of view. Nevertheless, if I'm still using what they are providing then I'm not doing anything to support or legitimise google's competitors. I'm also still going to see the sort of content that is cultivated by youtube's algorithms and business practices.
Third party apps are great though, especially if they can support multiple video hosting platforms and download videos to view offline. Newpipe is a good example of this. I can quickly go between my youtube subscriptions and my peertube ones.
That may be true but if you're using a frontend then you're just trusting them with your data instead. Perhaps many of those could be run by people with even more malicious intent. I have interacted with quite a few invidious/piped instance owners, and most of them are quite... unstable individuals.
Unless those instance owners have access to someone's google account data then I'm guessing they have no more data on said user than any other website they visit.
I’m also still going to see the sort of content that is cultivated by youtube’s algorithms and business practices.
I think if you can avoid the youtube algorithm recommendation too is the best you can get with "de-googled" youtube, what is impossible to avoid is how the algorithm influences what the creators do with their contents.