wpuckering

Atheist here. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Atheism is merely about trusting what’s been proven, or has some evidence backing the claim that can be verified without doubt. Being agnostic is being indecisive about everything, even things that are completely made up.

The only way to guarantee you can see exactly what you want, without being at the mercy of anyone else, is to run your own instance.

I use Clipious, an Android client for Invidious, on my phone. I selfhost my own Indivious instance so this is perfect in that my phone never connects to YouTube directly, and I can save all my subscriptions in one place without a YouTube account.

On my Android TV I use Smart Tube Next. If I really need to cast, I also have YouTube ReVanced on my phone for just that, but I barely use it.

As soon as Clipious gets a proper Android TV interface, I’ll be set, as both devices can just connect to Invidious and let it do all the work.

Wasabi is great and cheap for S3-compatible object storage.

There’s a lot of things that factor into the answer, but I think overall it’s gonna be pretty random. Some instances are on domains without “Lemmy” in the name, some don’t include “Lemmy” in the site name configuration, and in the case of some like my own instance, I set the X-Robots-Tag response header such that search engines that properly honor the header won’t crawl or index content on my instance. I’ve actually taken things a step further with mine and put all public paths except for the API endpoints behind authentication (so that Lemmy clients and federation still work with it), so you can’t browse my instance content without going through a proper client for extra privacy. But that goes off-topic.

Reddit was centralized so could be optimized for SEO. Lemmy instances are individually run with different configuration at the infrastructure level and the application configuration level, which if most people leave things fairly vanilla, should result in pretty good discovery of Lemmy content across most of these kinds of instances, but I would think most people technical enough to host their own instances would have deviated from defaults and (hopefully) implemented some hardening, which would likely mess with SEO.

So yeah, expect it to be pretty random, but not necessarily unworkable.