Ya there's no such thing as "being forced to use it". What are they going to do, lock you in your room with no food if you refuse? Just stand up for yourself and say you are not comfortable having it in your room and don't compromise on it.
There's nothing stopping creators from doing sponsored videos and/or sharing their liberapay/opencollective/patreon on peertube, they even provide a dedicated place for it.
Most of the youtubers I follow claim YouTube's direct compensation makes up very little of their overall income, especially since YouTube keeps lowering the compensation/demonetizing everything. Most of their income comes from sponsored videos, patreons, and merch sales. Maybe it depends on the youtuber but it seems consistent with those I follow.
Hmmm nope I just updated some apps yesterday. I had to uninstall and reinstall Aurora store cause it wasnt showing the anonymous option anymore, but after that it popped up and worked like normal, no sign in.
Look into the user profiles feature to further isolate any play store apps you still use. I have one profile called gshit and thats the only one I install anything non-opensource on from the Aurora store.
This prevents any playstore apps from accessing say photos, contacts, messages, etc on your main profile.
PS. If you don't like the stock launcher either you should check out KISS launcher (minimal mode)
I was looking at these too a couple days ago but cheapest option is like $500USD without batteries, camera, radio controller, etc. Half of them are so expensive you have to call for a price and shit.
Not exactly beginner pricing IMO when you may just crash it anyways
Having tried both popOS and manjaro I'd urge you to skip my trail and error and check out Nobara from the get go. Always found little naggling issues until I found Nobara
Its not unheard of to have underground walking tunnels in cold cities connecting buildings and areas, but I haven't heard of any expanded to support biking.
University of Calgary has a bunch of them if I remember right, can get all over the place underground when its cold AF out.
You can also download ready-made decks for different categories in many languages. Useful for expanding your vocabulary I find.
I mean, not a great source... That's just a link to a forum post and the only thing they reference for it "not being secure" was a github PR from 2021... Not saying its great they had teething issues, but that's literally a year within starting up and they fixed all those issues right away, and had an independent audit done. So I kinda feel like using it to say they're not secure now isn't very useful. But if you have something showing their current deployment is insecure please share.
They did a complete infrastructure overhaul at the start of 2023 too moving to their own hardware and such so I imagine more might have changed since 2021 than just those issues.
Searx has lemmy search integrated into the "social media" engine settings. Just go to preferences and remove any platforms you dont use (reddit included by default). You can also use !commands to specify only posts, comments, communities, etc too. Just heard about it the other day and its easily my favourite way to search lemmy now
Use the user profiles feature of grapheneos to make a "social" profile and only use that to access Instagram / facebook.
Meta sells your convo data on WhatsApp for ads, if you use it you will get targeted ads regardless.
Other options are signal (Molly on fdroid), simplex, etc.