I disagree with the article you linked. It seems the author believes the purpose of decentralization was to give instance admins “power”. I’ve always said that the Fediverse was just a thousand little Twitters, but some people don’t mind that at all. If you just want to run a little community where you can protect yourself from outsiders I guess it’s nice.

The way I see it decentralization is about preventing a gatekeeper not making more of them. If you never got your account (and all the content and followers you created with it) taken away by a power tripping moderator you may not understand. You can’t deplatform someone from Bluesky, or Nostr, and that is a feature.

Do you use a VPN on the Android box or does your router handle that?

Not necessarily a “piracy” app, but SmartTube is the first app I sideload on an Android TV. It’s a generally better YouTube app, but it’s ad/sponsorship/intro skipping is 💯!

https://smarttubenext.com/

That’s not how AI works