So many online platforms that are used today are slowly becoming hostile to their user bases. By "hostile" I mean that they no longer serve the average user; they try to milk every second of attention or every cent of ad revenue. Platforms like YouTube and Reddit seem to change their user interfaces every few months, bringing with it some new feature that nobody asked for. The users could switch, but in this day and age of monolithic corporations, there never really are true alternatives. There are, however, ways to game the system.
Developers have found ways to exploit large social media applications and essentially create "overlays" for them. It's possible to view YouTube videos without a Google account, so a program can actually retrieve YouTube videos and display them in a similar format. Thanks to FMHY, I have discovered a few of these kinds of apps.
Grayjay
This is the YouTube application that allows you to subscribe to certain creators and watch videos. It even includes other platforms like Twitch. It also allows you to create playlists and search for videos from channels you're not subscribed to. I'm sure there's a variety of other features I haven't discovered yet.
One downside is that it does not seem to save the progress on videos you watch. So if you have a "Watch Later" playlist (like YouTube has by default if you're signed in) you'll just have to remember where you were if you want to resume watching a long video. I think the benefits of not dealing with actual YouTube outweigh this, though.
Photon
If you're like me and you browse Reddit too much you will like this one. Reddit's UI has gotten progressively worse over the years, and the last straw for me was the implementation of in-app games on the sidebar. Photon is designed in a similar vein to Grayjay, where it's just an overlay for Reddit. You sign in with your real Reddit account to get your feed, but you can subscribe to new subreddits directly from Photon.
Lucida
This isn't really an overlay as I've been focusing on before. Lucida is a music ripper; it downloads music for you from a few select sources. Yt-dlp is also a useful tool for this task, but Lucida saves a lot more time because it automatically applies metadata information. I have a routine when downloading music with yt-dlp where I go through and edit the tags of the mp3 files directly, but now I can just look up what I need on Lucida and let it go. There's lots of benefits to keeping your music on your own devices, so this website can be a good alternative to music streaming services such as Spotify.
Conclusion
There's tons of other useful applications and websites on FMHY. There's even Discord clients that you can take advantage of, but I haven't been able to get one of them working for me yet. If you find anything else useful, let me know on Bluesky or Mastodon, or send me an email at skel101@pm.me.