I'd recommend voyager first it's what I've been mostly using and since I started there's been almost daily updates adding more and more quality of life features and stuff people are requesting. It's been pretty incredible to see! There's also a neat feature that can take your list of subreddits from a reddit account and help you find their equivalents throughout lemmy. Liftoff and Thunder are 2 other good ones I've been playing around with. And best of all, no fuckin ads haha

How does the quote go, "die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain" what a shameful fall for Google

Showed up for me on google.ca lol. Glad I switched to duck duck go a whole a go.

I usually watch YouTube on a laptop hooked up to my tv, so I downloaded freetube and just imported my subscriptions. It's got sponsorblock and other features built in, but you can't like or comment on videos. Overall though I've been using it for about 6 months now and wouldn't dream of going back to YouTube and trying to constantly deal with them fucking it up more daily.

I used to use an app called airmore on my phone and desktop to play music. It does photos and videos too. If I remember you download the airmore app on your phone(I think you have to install it by apk) and then it'll direct you to a web Adress on your pc. Once there you scan a QR code to pair thr devices and you can cast stuff from your phone to your pc. I haven't used it in a while but it always worked pretty decent for me.

thanks for the recommendation, ive been playing around few of the option but this seems like the one that will work best for me. it was easy to set up on both my desktop and phone and seems to have all the functionality i need

Awesome, good to know, thanks!

Ahh ok. So after disconnecting you don't get any ads or suggestions or anything right? Just functions as a dumb tv?

Did it work right out if the box or did you have to connect to update it first? I haven't bought a tv for some years but I just use a laptop connected to my tv to stream anything, so all the smart features are pretty useless to me. I was wondering if it was possible to keep it a "dumb" tv by simply never connecting it to the internet or updating it.