I think a few more details are needed to get you a clear alternative:

• Which devices you want to cast from? what content you want to cast (DRM content like netflix, and/or your own media)? what kind of TV you have?

In my case after degoogling, I use mainly apple devices besides my windows pc. 2 of my TVs have AirPlay built in, so there’s no issue casting anything. If your TV is rather recent it’s likely to have it too.

The third TV is tricky, it’s an older 4k LG. I have a linux box connected to it and installed UxPlay in it. It only works with AirPlay “mirroring” so you kinda need an app that can treat the TV as a second monitor. Otherwise the mirroring won’t cover the entire TV screen. I’m still assuming apple devices here, but there’s OutPlayer and nPlayer in the appstore that can do this. It does support sound-only casting, so if it’s music you want it should be able to direct cast from your apps.

The second caveat for UxPlay is that it only works with DRM-free content (youtube, self hosted media). For DRM content I haven’t found a nice alternative for the old TV , so I use its built in apps (netflix, amazon prime). Kodi exists, but the plug-ins support for streaming sites isn’t good, often getting stuck to low-res content.

I’m guessing buying an apple tv/fire stick/roku is the only alternative for DRM content casting. I also explored the idea of “degoogling” my unused chromecast 3rd gen, but absolutely nothing exists for this and it just collects dust in a drawer.

Same, I’d take it any day over VLC because of native dark mode. VLC’s themes are janky and weird-looking.

Today most Invidious instances are experiencing very harsh ip address rate limiting, it is becoming very very hard to watch yt videos through

AFAIK this is not what’s happening this time. YouTube slowly rolled out a change over the past 3 days that requires some sort of app verification for the android yt app. This is affecting Invidious since it emulates the yt android client to fetch video streams. This affects invidious instances hosted privately as well.

The maintainers are aware of this, and are working on ways to solve it. Tools like yt-dlp/newpipe still work because they have working implementations to fetch data by emulating web/iOS/etc clients.

This is a bigger issue to leave it to users imo. Like lemm.ee admin said a few months ago, threads is too fucking big.

Anything they push on the fediverse will be what users see in All. Plus, popular stuff on threads is determined through Facebook’s algorithm, and it will also determine the fediverse recommendations by consequence.

The above is solvable if you block them I guess, but by default it will completely ruin everything.

However, lemmy 0.19 block feature doesn’t work on users of an instance, only posts hosted in an instance. Add to this that Facebook is a cancerous company making all its money from ads. Expect their bots to comment and make posts pushing ads on all instances.

All of this will also mean high workload on mods to regulate the content. Threads doesn’t bring anything good here, and defederation is probably the only way to protect us.

Didnt look at it like that tbh, and it makes sense now that I think about it.

Those who are still on the ‘apple bad’ train like to forget they are running an OS built by an ads company.

Every phone manufacturer has some bad shit, I choose to stick with apple cuz I already have a big library of paid stuff.