I’m a big privacy and FOSS advocate so my list is kinda long, but the main ones are:
-> Google (I use GrapheneOS)
-> TikTok
-> Tesla (too much data collection)
-> Microsoft (self explanatory, however for some things I need to keep an w10 LTSC VM configured)
-> Adobe (same reasons as Michaelsoft)
-> OpenAI (same reasons as Michaelsoft, but I do use it inside a vm in no-account mode for some work related things)
-> Uber (oh man that app is digital herpes)
-> Spotify
-> Facebook/Meta
-> Dropbox
RedLib and Invidious hoster here;
I can confirm they do not use any backend API, however this means eventually they (YouTube and Reddit) kick on automatic rate limiting after a while and I have to switch up my vpn connection on my server. it’s annoying, but it works if you know a thing or two about proxies and web scraping (the knowledge from scraping can be cross applied to implementing a suitable proxy config)
that said, RedLib’s backend token spoofing works a lot better than the Invidious method (Invidious emulates web traffic via Android mobile devices and gets the videos from Google Videos directly, bypassing YouTube for the heavy lifting).
As a Libertarian Lemmy user, I sympathize. I find it strange how there is a general ethos here that if you don’t agree with the left/“communism”, you are therefore “MAGA”/conservative. I’m not even American but if I was, I wouldn’t vote GOP either…