Hence the fight. Why do I feel like I’m being taken oddly literally here today?

I know that but it still feels like paying twice, or paying extra for something that should be standard in any sane world. Presumably this software doesn’t give you a download licence.

Paying money to download content I’ve already paid for?

Yes I’m aware of that, I assumed that a site recommended on here would have that as a main feature otherwise it’s not much use for archiving. I already tried yt-dlp and it doesn’t seem to be supported.

There doesn’t seem to be any way of saving videos there, am I missing something?

Nobody sane wants to “use” it, but sometimes someone will inconsiderately link something on there.

How to install adblockers, how to detect fake download sites that give you computer aids? Show them how to use a VPN and choosing the right one (a true pirate must always choose a VPN with port forwarding capabilities, so you can still seed) I feel like this is all valuable info we all learned as pirates the hard way, and valuable information to pass on to our kids.

Absolutely, I would say whether you’re teaching piracy or not, those are essential things that everyone online must know about; it would be unethical to allow your kids to go online without that protection.

Well FreeTube never claimed to be a platform, it’s a fantastic front-end for browsing YouTube videos without having to deal with Google’s crap, but you’re still using YouTube.

I find keeping a calendar is useful for remembering routine tasks.

This is basically the method I use:

https://fedoramagazine.org/btrfs-snapshots-backup-incremental/

These days I use Btrfs snapshots to do incremental backups to an external drive each week, it’s manual but it takes less than 5 minutes a week, the most I risk losing is a week of data and I trust it a lot more than relying on some external service that might go down at any time or randomly decide to delete my account. For most people just worried about photos I would assume that’s enough, I feel like anything else is just over-engineered.

Just do backups, isn’t that easier than using a cloud service?

I strongly believe nuisance advertising should be fought separately from privacy concerns. Both are valid concerns but need a different approach. Advertising based on website visits that collect user data is privacy intrusive, but an ad baked into a YouTube video is probably not (regardless of whether it’s annoying or not).

Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.

No, I’m not having that! That’s rewriting of history. I remember when Google came out, it was pretty much as good as Altavista and no more. It had the additional appeal that it looked (for the time) unique and fresh and had a weird name, I remember getting my friends to try this “weird new search engine that might someday beat Altavista” but it never revolutionised anything in terms of search results at the time.

Also Altavista was not getting progressively worse, I still remember the days when you could type a simple dictionary word into a search engine and have it return 0 results. Altavista is what changed that, not Google.

It’s an unnecessary layer of abstraction that solves a problem that never existed. If you have a lot of podcasts it’s nice to be able to organise them in a directory structure that makes sense to you, not necessarily what the app wants. Also podcast file names aren’t always easily sortable or even human-readable so you’ll want to rename them as you save them.

I’m not changing folder structure constantly, I just want it somewhere sensible where I can find it.

AntennaPod is one of the better ones but it doesn’t beat the good old-fashioned “Save As” where you can put it wherever you like. I don’t want a podcast app to manage my files, a file-manager does that.

If you don’t really care about the podcast then that’s OK, but if I like a podcast I want a permanent offline copy to relisten to if the podcast goes offline. I guess I’m a bit of a data-hoarder and that’s niche, but simply being able to save a file you download to where you want I think should be a standard feature, there’s no need for an extra layer of abstraction.

The problem is for me that it usually downloads to some obscure folder, not to where I want to save and archive my podcasts.

Nothing beats just downloading a podcast and listening to it in VLC or you audio player of choice - I don’t really understand why podcast apps are needed.

But that said, if you need to use one AntennaPod has all the features and you can even get it on F-Droid.