It does matter. You can still browse and even post and comment on LW communities, even when LW itself is down. But maybe more important is that LW is having problems because many people are using it, so switching to different instances actually helps LW be more stable.
Try using one of the medium-size instances. You get the same experience as on lemmy.world, minus all the scaling problems. Just create an account on one of them and copy over your settings and subs with lasim. You can even use the same username if it's still available on the other instance.
I think your best option would be something like an RSS reader. Most website offer RSS feeds for channels or subs, so you can add those to the reader and create one list of new videos.
You can't really make your favorite content creators switch to other platforms, so the best thing you can do for now is use a privacy-preseving frontend for YT. I can highly recommend Piped for PC and LibreTube for Android. They allow you to watch all YT videos and manage your subs/playlists without having a YT account or using the YT site or app. You can even self-host a Piped server if you want to.
Edit: So the major difference between Piped+LibreTube and NewPipe is that Piped is a website that handles the YT scraping and sub/playlist management for you, and the LibreTube app just connects to it like the YT app connects to the YT website. This means you can access it from your browser, synchronize your subs/playlists between devices and also hide your IP from Google servers. NewPipe accesses YT directly from your phone, so it has to do all that by itself and on every device separately.
Basically:
YouTube app or browser => YouTube website (has user data)
NewPipe app (has user data) => YouTube website
LibreTube app or browser => Piped website (has user data) => YouTube website
That's not part of this spec, all it says is that the attester produces a cryptographic proof. What it checks and what that proof means is for the attester to decide.
Google and Apple say they would "just" check if the user is logged into their Google/Apple account, as a way to proof that they are human and not a bot. That would be bad enough, because you should not have to have an account with these companies to browse the web. But they could easily make it even worse, by requiring you to install a kind of anti-cheat software that scans your device, and only provide the proof if they like the results. Heck they could just exclude everyone who visited a certain website in the past or who's name starts with an F if they wanted to, because that's how broad and dangerous this proposal is!
Big companies should not be able to decide if people are allowed to visit certain websites or not, even if they say they have the best intentions.
You know, most major web servers are open source projects (Apache, nginx, ...). They could in theory decide to check for the browser that's accessing a website and just return an error If it's a variant that supports WEI. Ofc people could fork them and remove the check, but many might just use them as is.
Just a thought though, this would be a very radical and hugely controversial step.
The details are a bit different. PATs use HTTP headers during a request while WEI is a JS browser API. But otherwise the general structure and end result are the same. A website requests an integrity check, an attester checks your device, and if the attester doesn't like your device then you're SOL.
I want to be able to pick a song and say "give me a playlist of similar songs I don't know yet", and have that play immediately. That's just not something a self-hosted setup can do. :/
I tried getting a music setup to work, but I couldn't find a good solution for generated playlists with new song recommendations. The self-hosted music service just can't add songs it doesn't have yet, so it's not really feasible. Plus I still have a very cheap YouTube Music subscription from the GPM days.
I've been self-hosting a personal email server for about half a year now, and it was definitely challenging! But it also tought me quite a bit about how the system works, so I think it was worth it. There are solutions for everything, but you definitely need some time and patience.
Because of the network effect and content aggregation. With emails you just want to reach a specific person, with public posts you want to reach as many people as possible. But I also think the whole ownership and control problem of centralized social networks wasn't as apparent as it is now.
I would call that browsing, posting and commenting, even if it doesn't sync to other instances until the source instance is back up.