Ads are not just inconvenient but very often annoying and misleading, so I can’t blame anyone for that.

Micropayment donations might, though. It’s not annoying, not misleading, and there is a considerable amount of people even now that regularly donate/otherwise support their favorite content creators, and this would be even more convenient because it is automatic and the amount depends on how much time did you watch videos.
And it doesn’t even necessarily depend on cryptocurrencies.

Most importantly because I don’t want to support that wholly unethical company that google is, and I think nobody else should. They already have plenty of money, which would be enough, if they wouldn’t be a publicly traded company with endless thirst for more and more and more and more.

The users used ones won’t know or care about that

It’s interesting to see that even such sites as tomshardware are writing about it, because, at least how I see it, they are not a privacy-centric site where things like this are often a topic

If they do that, nearly no one will find it, though. Are there larger non-federating servers?

I think the problem with this approach - read: the reason I don’t do this - is that you’re blocking communities from ever appearing again, and if your interests change, you still won’t see them. I think this is more likely to result in creating an echo chamber.
What I do is subscribe to communities that I found interesting, and then scroll all once in a while to see if there’s something else I like

I’m mostly reading my subscribed feed, and sometimes switch to all and if I find an interesting community, I subscribe to it too. The only communities I have blocked are either porn related or operating in a foreign language, which I see even though havening set my language preferences.

But there are many ways such as access logs, server monitoring etc

Which are all in the control of the company running the servers. If we trust the company, we can trust them giving honest information on these, but if we don’t trust the company… they could just redact logs or even straight out fake them

I only have one question: how will your company find out?

If you run it on a container, it should be enough to just make a copy of the set up volumes, right? (with permissions and all the metadata kept of course)

I’m not the one who you were responding to, but considering google’s history, I don’t believe anything they claim, because they have lied so many times in the past, and because every “privacy guarantee” they provide is practically unprovable. It’s nothing more than wishful thinking to think that google does nothing with government data stored with them, with google classroom data of millions of children, and others. They have shown that they can’t be trusted.

The benefit of the higher resolution shouldn’t be about the colors, but that with bigger screens the movie does not start to get blurry.

For desktop use on a desktop display, I don’t see the benefit either. Even less on a phone, that is totally unnecessary.

If you’re at that point of not trusting a company, the best practice would be to avoid using their devices or connecting them to your network.

Yes, that would be the best practice. However there are a lot of best practices that cannot be followed for one reason or another.

I don’t see what that has to do with the drive dying. Every drive dies at some point, even if left in it’s place

Or if you don’t trust Microsoft to begin with, just use Veracrypt, it won’t upload your recovery key anywhere, but will help to make a recovery usb stick.

Additionally, the problem above was not some kind of “unhealthy paranoia”, but disliking Microsoft and then still creating an account for some reason, one that they deemed to be a throwaway account. Question is why did they do that (oh, because Microsoft made it hard* to skip registering an account? That can’t be! Microsoft is trustworthy and anyone thinking else is just unhealthily paranoid, right?), but also how should have the user known that this was a dangerous thing to do? Don’t tell me they should have read the dozens of pages of dry legal text.

*Yes, it’s hard if it’s not an option in the installer. How the fuck you look it up when you don’t have your computer?

And you slowly figure out that every photo, every document, everything critical to you is now protected from you and you can’t get it back.

How fortunate that onedrive auto uploads those to Microsoft. That is, until you run out of your quota…

There’s an extension that can unlock LUKS drives using the TPM, but by default it does not do that, and probably that extension isn’t installed either

Hopefully it’s not news to them that they have some kind of Microsoft account, let alone know the credentials to it.

but a video player to run through the command line on a daily drive desktop with GUI and everything?

I’m not running it from the command line, I open videos with it from my file manager, or through the Jellyfin plugin.

I mean when I’m on my desktop I just want to click on my media file and launch it right away.

Yes, that’s what I do. Of course, your desktop environment has to know that you have this MPV and it can open such and such files, but it can work like that.

I don’t know what they mean, but to me it didn’t become less great, just MPV (based players) are often better. They are more customizable (even scriptable) and better with the resource usage.