In the same boat. Besides other problems NewPipe hasn’t worked ever since the last 2 months, and honestly, I’m tired of chasing for different solutions.

I saw it coming and tried to work on my habits over the past year. Slowly reducing watchtime and cutting down the number of channels in general. It helps a lot. Also moved everything music related to other platforms.

I now gave Odysee a go as I feel its a very familiar experience. But it’s a disaster especially if I take a look at content in my native language. I’m happy with the few tech channels on there however, it will keep me afloat for a while if I have a particularily bad day and need to watch some stuff to regulate my feelings. So I’d also be interested in channel recommendations on other platforms and the like.

I was wondering if it wouldn’t be more important to take action at this point. You know, this could be a controversial topic, but I was thinking about some uniform text that everyone could use to send to their favourite content creators, informing about the situation and asking them to at least consider mirroring content to other platforms or move elsewhere. idk, just an idea. maybe it’s a starting point for further discussion on how to solve this mess.

Maybe it seems weird to do sth like this but in the end, it’s still YouTube, things tend to spread pretty quickly on there and I guess a few creators are very aware of whats going on already. So why not try. If all those still cling to this platforms, idk if things will ever change.YouTube will be happy to have those voices leave the platform anyway, pretty sure about that. But I thought more of the effect it might have if a certain crowd just decides to leave the platform.

The other thing, I know, money issues. It’s not an easy and quick thing to move a viewer base to a different platform, especially if you have the comfort of having a somewhat regular income on the other. We need to talk about solutions for this as well. And we need to ask ourselves the question how much we are willing to sacrifice in this process.

I guess what it all boils down to is: there’s other questions we need to ask ourselves now instead of just thinking about the next best solution on how we are able to consume free content again. And yes, I have a hard time with that myself.

We need more discussion, ideas, solutions, and some brains that can implement those ideas by creating the spaces we need. It’s all so difficult and so much to navigate.

sorry if this went a bit off-topic. hope you have a great day :)

Was about to say the same, definitely a good choice!

Bandcamp. You always have the opportunity to pay as much as you wish as long as the minimum amount is covered, some even offer free Downloads. It might be a question of time however how long Bandcamp will stay this way as it was bought a while back. It’s also a good place to get releases that you might not be able to find locally, for instance some lables in other regions.

It might be difficult to find some smaller Bands however, as it takes a while and a bit of sucess until Bands make the jump from just playing live to uploading Music to Streaming Services. I’d recommend looking for Labels first and dig through other people’s collections on Bandcamp.

I guess in Metal circles attending Concerts and Festivals are still very much the way to go, as many people still appreciate not only Live events but also buying Vinyls or Merch even to support Bands or as Memorabilia. Many Festivals focus on the local Music scene, you can often support them by buying Merch as well, and they are great for networking as (at least in Europe) many organization teams are in contact with each other. You should also keep your eyes open for Vinyl stores, it’s a great way to get in contact with other metalheads or discovering new Music.

I hope that helps :)

Edit: You probably know most of what I said anyway so I hope it doesnt come across in a weird way, I just wanted to express my take on it. Maybe consider getting a high-quality Record player if you feel like going down that road :)

Discord, definitely!! It might be hard to ditch but it’s worth trying. I was never a big fan of it so it was kinda easy yet I still miss being able to contact some people on there. But the more people continue using it, the harder it will be to change things.

Spotify and Chromium, I agree on both as well. Try the options mentioned above concerning Spotify. And yeah, Music streaming is a hard one… I have a dedicated mobile device for Music streaming platforms of this kind if I feel the itch as well as a modded ipod for on the go. Besides that using Bandcamp on a seperate user profile on a Pixel with Graphene OS, no Google stuff installed however and it works pretty great. Highly recommend getting into a habit of buying Music (digital/physical) and listening stuff you actually own on desktop. Simple cmus or sth will do the job.

Maybe Librewolf or other Firefox fork for Browser.

Edit: typo. Edit 2: I’d keep a chromium-based Browser of some sort, you might need it sometime for something. Just use different Browsers for different things.