Security as in cybersecurity, yes. Security as in not getting caught violating government bans, not so much - if you’re in a country where getting repressed by your government is a real possibility, it helps a lot for it to not be possible to see exactly what sites you visit. Reminder: even over HTTPS, the domain name (like lemmy.world) is normally not encrypted. Encrypted Client Hello can solve this, but it has only started being commonly used a year ago or so, and more importantly requires the host to support it.

I’m not aware of how exactly blocking works there, but if it’s similar to China and Russia, consider subscribing to a VPN provider that supports stealth proxies (e.g. Shadowsocks or VLESS); that’s harder to block.

There are feature differences there’s also a convenience factor: youtube-dl people for some reason stopped doing releases, so you can’t get a fresh version from pypi (only installing from github or their site). Yt-dlp is on pypi, including nightly builds.

Works much better with fzf, but even just default bash it’s useful.

Invidious alone has been working quite badly this year (stopped working for months until inv-sig-helper was invented, etc), but combined with FreeTube it almost always works; can recommend.

Have you considered just not watching shortform video like tiktoks and youtube shorts?

No linux user ever leaves home without their… piss minigun??

Thunderbird definitely does have autosync nowadays. No tray icon, true, but it can send native notifications which isn’t much worse.

People have already said how to fix this, but I’ll add this different piece of advice: start using FreeTube.