Unlike immutable distributions that lock you out of the native package manager

Direct pacman use is blocked. /usr/bin/pacman is a wrapper around pacman-real

Regardless, I do support attempts to make an immutable and declarative Arch distro. An an ostree implementation on Arch is an interesting experiment. You might want to check out Darch which boots from container images.

$8 mil is pocket change for the investors. It’s like eight dudes all giving their bro $100 for his art project.

So its not tracking you across instances? Then its probably tracking the invidious instance itself and not you in particular unless invidious leaks some amount of data about your browser which is possible.

If you don’t want YouTube to be able to develop a temporary profile from a single invidious session then I think you’re out of luck. Either make a new session per-video or give up. Invidious needs to pass YouTube’s bot management somehow and once it does YouTube will give it a trackable session token.

Are you always using the same invidious instance? Does it track across different invidious instances?

Its possible that is YouTube isn’t building a profile of the user but a profile of that specific invidious instance which is all of its users collectively. Its also possible that invidious is leaking some browser info like User-Agent to YouTube. That way switching IP doesn’t matter as long as its the same invidious instance.

Switching invidious instances should clear that up. If not then you’ve got a serious problem with invidious.

You just change it when you want to drop any profile you developed. ie on browser start. The problem with changing it every page is sites will assume you’re a bot and either block you or serve you a captcha on every page.

Browser Fingerprinting. You must configure your browser to lie about what it is and change the lie repeatedly. Simplest way is plugin to change your browsers User-Agent. This will be a big deal on mobile because mobile browsers will actually report the device model in the UA. Be prepared to see lots of captchas if you do this though.

They probably can just block IPs of foreign DNS but I suspect there’s ways of mirroring around that.

In Germany, we have the Clearingstelle Urheberrecht im Internet (CUII) - literally ‘Copyright Clearinghouse for the Internet’, a private organization that decides what websites to block, corporate interests rewriting our free internet. No judges, no transparency, just a bunch of ISPs and major copyright holders deciding what your eyes can see.

This is worse than whatever the UK is doing IMO.