Hi there everyone,

I've been paring away the hooks that Google's got in me and although I feel I'm about at a level that I am comfortable with, Youtube remains a large part of my idle life(of which there's sometimes a lot). No matter what I'm doing on the second screen, I've got my subscription list running basically full time. It's pretty much my only viewing outet as I don't consume any other visual media.

My use case is casual viewing. I don't create any content, my interests are super-varied and none of it involves politics, news or the like. It's more along the lines of guitars, drums, covers, automotive, classics, drag racing, antique rehabbing, miniature and diarama building, DIY, traveling, geoguessing, exploration, retro computing, including building, weird things like offroad towing, lawn care transformations, etc. It's all over the place.

I'm posting this on Lemmy instead of Reddit or similar so I'm well aware of the trade-off to be made when choosing niche platforms. I know I'll get a ton less in quantity of answers but I trade that for the quality of the answers. I'm not expecting a direct replacement that gives me everything I would like. I'm just hoping to find something that I can use if I choose to whittle down my usage on the media format.

The problem is that I can't find a single platform that comes even remotely close to matching the usage of Youtube. 3rd party frontends are a completely lost cause as Google constantly breaks them intentionally. Peertube, the most suggested and my first-tried was comically unsuited to a viewer of content. The two platforms I tried to register to (so I could build sub lists, get recommendations, etc) refused my registration because they don't allow "casual viewers" to register. I'm posting this on the Fediverse so I'm well aware of the additional hoops required to participate but peertube takes it to a whole new level of lack of intuitiveness. It feels like it's actively designed to dissuade people from participating.

I tried Odysee but that's just terrible. The front page that greeted me is even worse ragebait, extremism, clickbait, reaction and low effort videos. I did some searching for some of my interests and guitar cover for a band I like, for instance had a most recent video of 3 years ago offered. Rumble's front page is a steaming pile of shit on a white background and not a single video was of interest to me so I know better than to waste my time trying to fit my square ass into a round hole.

I am not having any luck with this search, if anyone has any suggestions, I'd be greatly interested to hear them.

Thanks for your time!