I you use the external player, and mpv in particular with yt-dlp installed, then you’ll have an alternative still using freetube as frontend to navigate YT.
I do prefer ytcui with yt-dlp backend, which is native, low on resources and I really like ncurses, but that’s up to anyone.
That said, yt-dlp also gets IP blocked every once in a while, and also find itself non working at all depending on G. moves…
You’re right, I forgot, in that regard for example with xmpp, besides being able to self-host you have multiple services, perhaps eventually there might be non just simpleX services but hosted by others as well, though it seems whether simpleX or self-host for now. So it’s true it’s decentralized by definition, perhaps not so much in practice though.
There’s another sad thing I just remember, it doesn’t yet support multi-divice syncing, and the alternative is to create groups with different members, one per device, and then in the same group apply the same for all other multi-device members. The reaction so far from the devs is that it’s not so important having a workaround at hand. So both things made me drop my trials with simpleX…
The only sad thing is that it’s centralized, kind of signal but better.
On the privacy front I believe xmpp + omemo shines, and jami is also very interesting (though jami for some reason is doing efforts to allow LLMs agents and bots, through plugins of course not by default, but I don’t see the need of any of that stuff on something like jami). Sadly briar is on maintain mode and it was really bad on phones’ batteries, tox never took of leaving only jami like a viable distributed alternative. xmpp is decentralized and federated, doing pretty well with omemo…
None of those are really needed, one can use plain LOS and use microG on top of it (as opposed to some years back when LOS devs opposed to it) without the need for LOS for microG neither /e/OS. However if this interests you perhaps calyxOS might interest you, which after several months came back with new releases, it’s like LOS with microG plus the ability to unlock/lock the bootloader which LOS doesn’t offer neither its devs seem interested on providing for the phone where that can be offered. Then there’s grapheneOS, using google services under a strict sandbox environment or container, however that’s not de-googling is it?