As Prices Soar and Services Shut Down (Even YouTube Starts Demanding Money for the Original or a Tolerable Experience) It's Time to Explore the Real Alternatives
https://inv.nadeko.net is the most viable instance of Invidious these days (but it inherits Google's censorship regime; it's un-viable for free speech)
The Web is getting worse. Almost everything seems to be getting worse. Previously I could access a site called "youtube" (it's some failed dating site that became hosting platform for lousy videos, still not making a penny!). I cannot (not anymore) access this "youtube" site because apparently not running some proprietary nonsense causes me to be blocked by it (unless Invidious is used and Google viciously attacks all Invidious instances). No wonder this "youtube" thing reportedly had many layoffs in recent years. It's not because of Invidious (not many people use Invidious or even know what Invidious is), it's because it's a catastrophe from a business perceptive and also a massive legal liability. Whether you censor ("moderate") too much or too little, you're doomed to be sued a lot by users, copyright holders, and political hacks. That's just Google in a nutshell. Apparently I'm not alone. As of 27 February 2025 at 19:10, some people express a desire to begrudgingly pay for what "youtube" simply used to be ("I'm getting really bored of the constant block YouTube ads...").
Speaking of Google, this new article from Jacobin says "Google Is Jacking Up Its Prices", yet the sites has totally failed to mention LibreOffice and Calligra suite, just like similar articles about Microsoft's equivalent. To quote Jacobin:
If you’re in one of the nine million organizations that use Google Workspace, your company likely just received notice that it’ll have to fork over a lot more cash to use its ubiquitous office applications. The monthly price for business plans is jumping 16 percent, from $14.40 to $16.80. If all three billion Google Workspace users paid that standard increase, that would equal an additional $7.2 billion in monthly revenue for the company. At the same time, Google’s cloud division, which houses Workspace, slashed its workforce this week, though the exact number of staff layoffs is unknown.
How about just quit using GAFAM altogether? That too should be mentioned as a very viable option. psydroid in IRC took note of an "article in Danish from the Aarhus municipality about moving from Azure to Hetzner" (no more Microsoft).
GAFAM, as usual, are offloading the costs of their commercial failure to locked in customers, to whom evacuation would just cost a lot of time/money/sanity (stress/anxiety). In a similar vein, Skype is proving that it lacks a business plan and probably never had any. We recommend that people explore software such as Mumble instead, whereupon not only the "cost" aspect goes away; control and privacy become feasible too.
Why does the media not mention secure alternatives to Skype? As psydroid put it, "is there a Microsoft campaign to keep free software alternatives out of the news? All the talk is about the monstrosity called Teams..."
"BigBlueButton and Jitsi-Meet have not gotten any press even during the height of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic," an associate said, whereas "Mumble had an article the other week about how it runs fine on a Raspberry Pi."
In a better world with greater digital autonomy, people would run their office suites locally on their own computer with open formats and all communications (written and verbal) would have proper end-to-end encryption, not depending on some "mother ship" like Skype (Microsoft) that acts as NSA outpost. █