My answer to this is to use a custom domain with an email aliasing service.

I’ve gone through about half of the 400 accounts in my password manager and moved them over. I’ll migrate the rest over the next week or so.

So, I’m switching from Gmail to Proton for now, but if Proton starts to get worse or Tuta catches up on functionality or there’s a better provider that emerges or I decide to try to self-host, it’s one easy change at the alias provider to redirect all of my mail to a new email provider.

I like your logic here. Torrent index -> alternative platforms -> YT proper.

Assuming the torrent index becomes decentralized, there are really two categories where it makes sense to build this in:

1. The YouTube frontends, as you mention

2. The self-hosted downloaders that already exist, like Tube Archivist

I think the second category is where you get all the seeding traction. Sure, it would be great if the Android frontends also participate, but there are thousands of NAS devices that are already downloading YouTube videos for a single user. If there was an addon that allowed all of these users to share content automatically, I think there would be a lot of buy in / seeding.

This thread basically illustrates the challenges for a beginner, such as myself.

I’ve been locked into the Google ecosystem for nearly two decades and am now trying to free myself.

I’d like to migrate to a hybrid solution that involves self-hosted NextCloud synchronized with a cloud provider that I can trust more than Google.

However:

Proton apparently makes false, or at least misleading, marketing claims and doesn’t fight a vast majority of its inbound government requests.

Tuta has been publicly accused by a member of the intelligence community of being a honeypot.

The rest of the email providers seem to implement even fewer protections, relative to these two.

So, what’s a guy to do?

Now, to be clear, I’m not saying that either of these companies are bad or that I believe that they’re actually honeypots. I’m just trying to illustrate the challenges faced by newcomers (and probably all of us).

While I’d prefer to absolutely maximize privacy and security on all fronts, given that my first goal is de-googling, I will probably start with Proton and NextCloud and re-evaluate from there, but I’m open to suggestions.

Thank you all – I really appreciate this community.