Let’s see if moving some letters around can get us to an answer

PRIVACY

PRIACY

PIRACY

Theres your answer.

Seriously, though, if you want audiovisual media like you specified, you either stick to pirating shit off Usenet or browsing YouTube through frontends within your onion browser, preferably using onion mail.

Other than that (and maybe even then) there’s gonna be at least a few machines that have exactly what you watched and when.

Your local library has plenty of media.

I will agree with you to an extent but:

To sign up for social media or even a gmail account, one has to provide a phone number for verification.

Yes and no. Many of them you can not use a phone number if you know how (Sign up with Gmail) but it shouldn’t be any surprise because all of these companies are data mining and advertising operations.

Obviously you’re posting to the alternative right now.

Youtube doesn’t work when not signed into a Google account

Yes it does?

or if one is connected to a VPN

That does complicate things. Sometimes you have to switch servers, but for the most part, it still works.

Even downloader programs like yt-dlp and freyr have been rendered useless

I downloaded 78 videos yesterday with it?

It depends on what media you’re consuming? Nearly all the media I consume is text based and works without JS. It’s usually available as plain HTML files or markdown files or similar, or in an ebook format like epub or pdf that I can download and read with zathura.

For audio-visual content it’s harder yeah. FreeTube and yt-dlp are working for me with Mullvad VPN as of time of writing. Some invidious instances are still working too. But I hardly ever watch YouTube—I think you may find that you miss YT much less than you’d expect, and if Google makes you pick between privacy and YouTube, you should pick privacy.

For everything but IG and FB, there’s a mess of alternative front ends. For YT, there’s a dozen ways to log in with an alt front end app. Freetube, Grayjay, all the pipe pipe pipe apps. Then Invidious routing traffic.

It sounds like you’re over-doing something like JS blocking. You have to find a balance.

Maybe ask in a privacy community and get specific on needs and your threat model.

Yeah, content is quickly being hidden behind all sorts of walls, and even governments are now passing laws to render content inaccessible without ID verification

I have just come to accept that the internet has shrunk. I liked it better back when it was smaller anyway. But it is frustrating whenever I have a problem that has been carefully solved by some random person on Reddit or some middle aged man on YouTube 20 years ago, only for it to be rendered inaccessible without giving up all kinds of privacy.

I look at youtube sometimes but I don’t have an account on it. yt-dlp worked for me last time I tried (maybe a few weeks ago) though there is a constant cat and mouse game. I guess it stopped working on age gated videos a while back. Other than that, if anything I would say there is too much video about stuff I would prefer to read about.

When I have to use a big tech platform I use a privacy preserving proxy site like invidious for youtube. The LibRedirect extension for Firefox makes it really easy and has a surprising number of sites it can serve mirrors for