I won't stand any ads on youtube. Getting blasted with 5 times the same ad at 300% loudness. And premium does not really get rid of it as well, they would have to forbid sponsored content. Every time ads start to slip through adblock I will happily spend hours trying to block them instead of watching a single one. If they don't want me to watch the videos for free they can easily put them behind a paywall. Or do some reasonable pricing if they need infrastucture costs covered.

However I don't mind sending a couple of bucks towards content creators that I watch regularly. That will easily be worth more to them than watching ads even for the rest of my life.

For uBlock:

! YT Homepage - Hide the Shorts section
youtube.com##[is-shorts]
! YT Menu - Hide the Shorts button
www.youtube.com###guide [title="Shorts"], .ytd-mini-guide-entry-renderer[title="Shorts"]
! YT Search - Hide Shorts
www.youtube.com##ytd-search ytd-video-renderer [overlay-style="SHORTS"]:upward(ytd-video-renderer)
! YT Search and Channels - Hide the Shorts sections
www.youtube.com##ytd-reel-shelf-renderer
! YT Channels - Hide the Shorts tab
www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="channels"] [role="tab"]:nth-of-type(3):has-text(Shorts)
! YT Subscriptions - Hide Shorts - Grid View
www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="subscriptions"] ytd-grid-video-renderer [overlay-style="SHORTS"]:upward(ytd-grid-video-renderer)
! YT Subscriptions - Hide Shorts - List View
www.youtube.com##ytd-browse[page-subtype="subscriptions"] ytd-video-renderer [overlay-style="SHORTS"]:upward(ytd-item-section-renderer)
! YT Sidebar - Hide Shorts
www.youtube.com###related ytd-compact-video-renderer [overlay-style="SHORTS"]:upward(ytd-compact-video-renderer)

Also lemmy.world is extremely slow in pushing out messages to other instances, if at all. So leading the pack is not necessarily the best thing until you figure out scaling.

This one will additionally use user submitted titles and thumbnails when available instead of just random ones.

I have seen https://opencollective.com/ used a lot to collect donations in a transparent way (also supporting crypto payments). Maybe that is something you want to look into as well.

Not exactly. I think the advertisers will start to ask some uncomfortable questions, as will any inverstors for the IPO.

Got a bit further on this.

If you set SERVER_NAME="http://" then Caddy will start listening on port 80 only, where traefik can reverse proxy into. Website works and it seems to find communities on other servers, but there are no incoming messages.

My Filters indeed

I don't think that would work. PiHole works on a DNS level and has no insight to the encrypted connection to Youtube. So it cannot see or modify the site content on the fly. uBlock Origin basically can (beside DNS based blocking) modify the websites' code after it has loaded into your browser.

The German flag is also rotated to the wrong direction, probably some others too. Usually what is in the top left stays in the top left. For reference see https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/media.worldcurling.org/media.worldcurling.org/wcf\_worldcurling/2019/08/06131254/Display\_of\_Flags.pdf

The thing is, the "software" actually is open source, so you can tell how data is requested from your smart ID. The german government ID has an explicit function for age verification that does not provide any personal information.
https://github.com/Governikus/AusweisApp2

However it is probably hard and costly to get certified to use any of those functions as a service provider.