Ok thanks, I’ll check it out.

Thanks. Extensions like CanvasBlocker probably mess with the JS, could that be what’s making me get blocked?

Yes! This works, thanks!

Nearly all the media I consume is text based and works without JS.

Yea, well, I bet you still jerk off manually

Does FreeTube work for you? It gives me “Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot” for every single video. It might work without VPN but I’m not interested enough to try.

It sounds like you’re over-doing something like JS blocking. You have to find a balance.

Wisely put and I suspect you’re right, but if it’s really just about using a VPN I feel like, “Well why do you want to know my IP address so bad?”. I did do the JS blocking trick for a totally unusable web experience but now I allow JS and it’s just a widely unusable web experience ¯\(ツ)/¯

Edit: doesn’t lemmy.world block people from posting through a VPN?

Yes, for me yt-dlp went from working to error 404 to working to error 403 :/

Thanks, I’ll look into LibRedirect.

Edit: it has that scary “Access your data for all websites” permission…

Yes, it seems wrong that now Google, one of the biggest companies of all time and one under a hostile regime, controls access to knowledge and information that individuals all around the world have worked together to compile over decades. Looking back now that we know about enshitification, we should have been more careful.