I don’t know… maybe it is because I am consuming most of my YT content on desktop and that carries over to my android experience. As a matter of fact I don’t consume shorts on Android and that may be the difference. My feed on desktop is all computer stuff, CBC stuff, occasional Marvel stuff, and ASMR stuff, and half of that I don’t watch.

I really feel sorry for you if that is what your Android Experience is. I would suggest GrayJay or New Pipe to get out of the Algorithm then. I could remember back about 5 years ago when I started getting full episodes as an ad, of absolute religious trash, and I am talking when I reported them the channel was banned in a single report trash, at a time when I, due to illness, that I would listen to while soaking in the tub with a lift to get my sick ass in an out, and they would put 45 minute shows as ads. I would get so angry but its a long ad, so it wasn’t worth me getting out of the bath to skip it, and 15 minutes later of “Kill the HOMO-Sexuals” and “that current bad thing happened because we voted in those godless communists and socialists… why we should just hang them and save the country! A-MEN!!!” and I was using up power on my bath lift to get my sopping wet butt up and report their ass. After the 5th report I temporarily moved to New Pipe and stuck to desktop where I got full episodes as ads but not THOSE episodes.

YouTube can really fuck themselves over when they sell contra-ads on leftist, or any media, and now they are reaping the whirlwind with the ad platform and the search platform in the middle of Antitrust right now.

I don’t get allot of that, possibly because I have History turned off and refuse to turn it back on.

• I vastly avoid Right Wing content, and most of what I do encounter is like old school Republican, reeeally old school Republican. They are as pissed at the Right Wing’s take over by the Alt-Right(and worse)
• YouTube has games?!?
• The shorts content I get is mostly computer content and news, some branding because I have entered contests, and that is it. I have seen 1 short that was even approaching jailbaity and it was an add for a coming of age movie.
• It has been literally over a year since I used Google to find a video (well except for a tech support video I keep loosing the link to that I use to help people with installing Windows 11 Locally) and I have been using Startpage which anonymizes Google results.

If you disabling your Ad ID and turning off your history and you still get all that BS I would be looking for an Exit Strategy to.

If you don’t want to use Steam you can use the Heroic Launcher that does Epic and other games, especially itch.io games.

I would like one with GIF and Meme support as well. I can live without it though, but it would be nice to have!

FUTO swipe isn’t there yet, but last I looked it was damn near what I was looking for, but the Swipe was useless. I should check it out again. And I don’t like using beta software for something as important as the keyboard. I don’t think I have tried Anysoft Keyboard before… I will have to check that one out.

Update Anysoft Keyboard doesn’t have swipe typing and it obviously wasn’t developed with English in mind. Typing in some of my secure passwords would have had me hopping between multiple screens. Great for some people but not for me.

Nice try and thanks for the suggestions. Futo is is still in Alpha and my old phone is still down so I won’t be testing it either. Thanks for the suggestion.

To quote the Features; “Glide typing (only with closed source library ☹️)”

I find that people who come from the old days of linux will often respond “you have to use terminal”, or “learn the operating system”, or even balk at people saying you can just use the GUI Interface/Desktop Environments. And then when you get help from expirienced users you get allot of terminal commands, which makes people think “I can’t use Linux without learning the terminal first”. In actuality it is just easier to show a person a command and ask for the results than it is to walk a person through getting the same info otherwise.

“OK, which Desktop Environment are you using?”.

“Desktop what?”.

“Which version of OS did you download and install?”.

“Cinnamon.”.

“X or Wayland?”.

“What’s a Wayland?”.

“OK, X. Is your system up to date and which kernel are you running?”.

…and so on. It is faster to just help working in the terminal. The Desktop Environments are fairly far along and most that I have worked with you could get by completely in the Desktop and not touch the terminal.

I would suggest Linux Mint, but for now I would stick to the non latest version of 21.3 as they bit off ALLOT in 22 and while it works for allot of people there are driver bugs they inherited from Ubuntu and have not implemented the fix for yet and allot of other pains in the toukus so if you want a version with the minimum of troubleshooting and stable Desktop Environments I would stick to 21.3 (If I had any sense I would be switching back to it from 22 myself).

If you want another option it would be Ubuntu and its Different Desktop ‘Spins’ to see which you like the most. Some people prefer to start off on Fedora and I am told it has a good DE, or some people recommend PopOS which had its own spin on a DE but they have let development lag on it as they developed their Cosmic Desktop for the Wayland project (the project that is superseding the X.org project for making windows).

Which ever you choose, good luck. I am in the same boat and I am trying to learn what I can before it is too late.

SwiftKey Keyboard. There are OS keyboards and even swipe predictive text keyboards but I wish there was one that had the skinability and functionality that learned from my typing without monitoring my clipboard and reporting it to Microsoft. Yet every other keyboard I have tried has left me disappointed.

I couldn’t watch past the Federation/Fediverse discussion. You can have several words for the same thing. There is no such thing as a “real word” so long as it fits the language. Language is a living evolving thing. And I watched and by that point they didn’t even get into how it works and explained everything but.