The Internet has tenants and landlords, which one are you?

Many complain that they are censored on the Internet, that they can't speak openly about certain topics for fear of losing reach and revenue, and so on. They depend on platforms over which they have no control, they are like tenants that can be kicked out at any time. When you post on platforms like X, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, you are using someone else's platform (someone else's home). The moment you stop being profitable and the advertisers or the owners of the company don't like you, they censor you, they kick you out.... And you can't do anything about it. Or can you?

The cheapest way to protect yourself against the whims of one platform is to use more than one. If one platform fails you, you still have the others. In my opinion, it's best is to use a free platform that is part of a decentralized network. If you are not convinced by any platform, you can set up your own. Is this expensive? No. Thanks to the ActivityPub protocol, it is very cheap to create a node within the Fediverse. The Fediverse is a large decentralized network with which you can reach millions of users. You can choose PeerTube to upload videos, Mastodon to create and share short written posts, Lemmy to discuss with other people...

You can also buy a domain name for very little money and set up a website on a server that you rent or set up at home. For further protection against censorship you can also set up a hidden Tor service.

You can also create a mailing list or a group in a messaging program. With this method, your publications reach your recipients directly, without depending on arbitrary algorithms that can limit your reach. If the server from which you send the emails belongs to you, you will have more control, you will be the sovereign.

In short, the trick to avoid censorship and the whims of big owners is to have your own platform or channel. If this is not possible, the best thing to do is to have several accounts spread across different platforms. This way, if you are censored on one, you still have the others.

How to download YouTube playlist

You can use yt-dlp. There are many ways to install it, one of them is with the package manager of your distro:

sudo apt install yt-dlp

To download a playlist you only have to type in a terminal yt-dlp and the URL of the playlist you want to download, and press the Enter key. For instance:

yt-dlp https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvvDxND6LkgB_5dssZod-3BET4_DFRmtU

This program not only downloads videos from YouTube, it can also download videos from many websites.