Nobody sane wants to “use” it, but sometimes someone will inconsiderately link something on there.

Well FreeTube never claimed to be a platform, it’s a fantastic front-end for browsing YouTube videos without having to deal with Google’s crap, but you’re still using YouTube.

I find keeping a calendar is useful for remembering routine tasks.

This is basically the method I use:

https://fedoramagazine.org/btrfs-snapshots-backup-incremental/

These days I use Btrfs snapshots to do incremental backups to an external drive each week, it’s manual but it takes less than 5 minutes a week, the most I risk losing is a week of data and I trust it a lot more than relying on some external service that might go down at any time or randomly decide to delete my account. For most people just worried about photos I would assume that’s enough, I feel like anything else is just over-engineered.

Just do backups, isn’t that easier than using a cloud service?

I strongly believe nuisance advertising should be fought separately from privacy concerns. Both are valid concerns but need a different approach. Advertising based on website visits that collect user data is privacy intrusive, but an ad baked into a YouTube video is probably not (regardless of whether it’s annoying or not).

It’s an unnecessary layer of abstraction that solves a problem that never existed. If you have a lot of podcasts it’s nice to be able to organise them in a directory structure that makes sense to you, not necessarily what the app wants. Also podcast file names aren’t always easily sortable or even human-readable so you’ll want to rename them as you save them.

I’m not changing folder structure constantly, I just want it somewhere sensible where I can find it.

AntennaPod is one of the better ones but it doesn’t beat the good old-fashioned “Save As” where you can put it wherever you like. I don’t want a podcast app to manage my files, a file-manager does that.

If you don’t really care about the podcast then that’s OK, but if I like a podcast I want a permanent offline copy to relisten to if the podcast goes offline. I guess I’m a bit of a data-hoarder and that’s niche, but simply being able to save a file you download to where you want I think should be a standard feature, there’s no need for an extra layer of abstraction.

The problem is for me that it usually downloads to some obscure folder, not to where I want to save and archive my podcasts.

Nothing beats just downloading a podcast and listening to it in VLC or you audio player of choice - I don’t really understand why podcast apps are needed.

But that said, if you need to use one AntennaPod has all the features and you can even get it on F-Droid.

Can’t say I’ve noticed myself with FreeTube to be honest, local API, I’ve been using it for years now and it’s probably as good as it’s ever been. The fallback for me if it ever doesn’t work is yt-dlp.

If it’s just the fallback that’s failing for the occasional video, under settings > general settings > Fallback to Non-Preferred Backend on Failure: - Check that the invidious instance there actually works.

If it’s happening regularly I would say there’s something else because that’s not normal, it used to be less reliable than it is now but it’s been very good for the last year or so. Only very occasionally I have to fall back to using yt-dlp these days (unless of course I’m keeping the video).