Speak for yourself and being mainly physically targeted, I came to Lemmy to get off of Reddit, I miss the local community as many people do not have the interest in figuring out Lemmy. I have cancelled all of my streaming services from the US, if there is something I want to see that is strickly on a streaming service I put on my pirates hat and sail the high C’s, other wise I watch it on the Canadian Channels app (with my pihole on so that I do not see ads so that it becomes less valuable for the Canadian channel to continue paying for it) I subscribed to CBC Gem+ or whatever it is called and watch Canadian content on there. I us Unwatched to watch YouTube so that I am not paying Google, I feel for the non US videos I watch but they are still getting money from Google but Google is not getting it from me.

One of the first buy Canadian things I did was move my blog hosting from a US provider to hosthero.ca and changed it from .com to .ca then I looked at my iCloud stuff and started finding other options. Sure they are not all together anymore and do not easily communicate together it is however far less expensive than what I was doing before. I was using Apple’s hide my email feature I had 60 some email address (I think). After going through all those addresses and finding out what was dead or not I moved something like 45 addresses to my hosthero email server, and I started moving more things that did not already have their separate email address to my address. I would later find out that my ISP changed to an exchange server, I have no idea if they have to pay Microsoft for that or what but I have been transitioning all of the emails I get from there to there own email address. This is not a short process and I am up to 120 some email addresses, all of the pseudo-random email addresses are forwarded to 1 of 5 email accounts that I check. I can have unlimited free trials for things if I so choose (have not done that with this yet, I had done this a couple of times for things in my iCloud days). I do not trust myself with hosting my own password manager so bitwarden is not really an option for me so I went with 1password, for my cloud storage I just downloaded everything to one of my pi’s but I was having all kinds of difficulties with hosting my own VPN and NextCloud crashed on me a couple of times so I decided to go with sync.com. If there was any real competition for youtube I would not be sneaking in via other apps I would be using the real alternative platform.