This is something I want to know too!
I don’t believe google deletes anything that has entered their system, my use case is that they don’t have visibility on when are my devices online, how many so I have, and such. But my gmail address has not been my primary one for long, so it’s not that important.

All I have found so far, though, is that what I need is possibly called a Message Delivery Agent.

They could still be compatible, though. it’s possible even today, to some degree

At least in the case of jellyfin, it’s not exactly just a “resource hogging frontend”.
For instance it keeps track of watch progress, in episode and through the series, and what did you watch last time so you can continue with whichever.
Allows you to remote control your player device (handy if it’s a TV or something like that) from your phone or another anything with a web browser.
It fetches info about the movies and series so it looks nice and for your users it is easier to pick something for themselves.
It has integration for MPV (and probably a few other players) so it does all the above.

And it does all these things in a way that everything is available across all your devices. Not just the content, but watch progress and everything else.

Something tells me you also tell your family that a Linux computer with no desktop environment is all one needs for everyday tasks.

And finally for OP: you don’t have to learn FreeBSD for ZFS, because Linux has it too. Because of licensing issues installation is a bit more complicated in most distros, but if you use Proxmox, they have done that part for you.

I’m pretty sure that on Linux I did not need to disable all functionality to upgrade

I was going to argue that your account is publicly viewable, but I realized that you may still be right. This depends on their definition of what is a user.

Same with semi-public. May even be used for anything that is not public but they don’t like it.

Wouldn’t that just need to happen within the infrastructure of an instance?

Any time on Linux, but the windows shells are unusable. And configuration databases are much more convoluted things on windows than text files

It’s not really fine, though. It’s much more sparse on information, and the animations slow you down because buttons are not clickable until the animation ended. And then there’s when the menu gets populated in chunks through a few seconds, don’t even try to click the button because it will jump away and you’ll click something else. No, this is not on an old machine: Ryzen system with SSD.

Nice screenshot, nobody will recognize by this what did they remove

I did not use Tor, just disallowed scripts

I’m interested, how that works?

I liked Opt Out a lot, but in recent years it has quite few episodes. It’s main topic is privacy and related technologies, in every episode they have a guest related to the current topic.

One more step

Please complete the security check to access

And also to explicitly feed garbage when the useragent is that of the googlebot. And while we are at it, do the same with a few other UAs too. You know which I mean.

Of course, that may not be feasible for everyone, but I do know that my visitors are not coming from google.

Using another frontend shifts the data profile but it still exists and provides value to them.

I wouldn’t care if they would only keep aggregate statistics, not stats about individual users, and when watching through a public frontend my usage blends in with that of many other people.

Unfortunately that’s not an option. Youtube has not only host “fun” videos, but repair videos, learning materials and even university course learning materials, none of them to be found elsewhere.

At a lot of places that’s not a question of choice.

Aaand if they allow downloading select files, it’s most probably not encrypted either.

Important clarification: snapshots only make backups faster if you do backups with zfs send, or with other filesystems they have the appropriate command too.

Everything gets a different, long random password. It’s not a hassle because my password manager handles everything. It’s bitwarden for whatever I may need to access elsewhere, few admin logins there, keepass everything else.