Not everything can be bought, that's a good thing.

How to Take Your Phone Off the Grid: "I set up accounts with [..] Apple". How does this combine?

I'm using the Piped YT frontend on Firefox with uBlock and I've not once seen any add pop up. I don't have a Google account but I added a bunch of rss-feeds to my Thunderbird, so I get a message when my favorite creators make a video. This way I'm not bothered by any stupid Google algorithm. Goes to show, YT is best consumed without an account.

qBittorrent

Been using it for 15 years or so. It was good back then, it's still good now. Chrome has never been an alternative for anyone who knows what Google is.

People who say piracy is theft are wrong, actually holders of intellectual property are thieves that are stealing that what should belong to the public domain. When you pirate you make a copy of something, you don't take anything away from the other person. That's fundamentally different from theft. When you force people to pay for a free resource (copying data) you are creating artificial scarcity. To think that construction is helping society in any way is fooling yourself. It's very clearly limiting human creativity and freedom. Allowing people to do with it as they please free of charge would allow for better ideas and applications to emerge. When someone comes up with an idea (a medicine, product, song, whatever) they claim it as theirs and no-one can touch it. Look at it this way: someone invents the wheel. The wheel is a concept that is out their, waiting to be discovered by someone. Before it was discovered it was readily available for anyone to discover, but than someone finally invents it and suddenly he can claim it as his? Is the first one to discover the moon, the one who owns it? Ultimately songs and books and such are not fundamentally different. Also, no-one writes a songs out of nothing, you build upon the ideas of others. You walk the path, use all the stepping stones laid down by others, it brings you to a point and suddenly it's all yours? It doesn't make any sense at all, but we're so used to it that we can't see it for what it is. It's a scam. It's a monopoly and it doesn't belong in a free society. You should support creators and be thankful for their efforts, that's why trademarks should exist, if you want to buy the copy from the author himself you should know which product to buy through the trademark, which one is by the original creator and which copies are from third-parties. But all other intellectual property is theft from the public domain.

I'm from the NLs and removed WA last year. What I liked about switching to Signal: people who care about me also installed Signal, so I didn't lose that. What I did lose? All the groups that I got into through the years, all of which were completely non-essential. If I need messaging with someone outside Signal I just use sms. The best part of leaving WA is that you'll find a lot of people willing to install Signal for your sake, and that's how it becomes easier for others to make the move.

Mastodon exploded when Elon took over Twitter. Lemmy exploded when Reddit changed it's api rules. I think the problem is not that YouTube doesn't fuck things up, because they often do. Perhaps the alternatives are not good enough for early majority to migrate. We need more early adopters to migrate ASAP. (I'm thinking of PeerTube, but perhaps Odyssee has beter changes at the moment)

I don't think you should expect any privacy on an Apple device

LimeWire was terrible. Quickly switched to Soulseek and have been using it ever since. Actually Nicotine+, but that's besides the point.

I use /e/OS and it suits all my needs. I use mostly F-droid apps but I have access to Playstore apps through the AppLounge and it works like a charm. I don't have to do any tinkering so far and I've been using it for a year or so.