One thing I find annoying is that there’s no way for me to let the company know that this behavior lost me as their customer forever unless they change their tune.

I’m fairly sure I’m the kind of person they’d market those products towards and it hurs them, but there’s no wat that I’m aware of to let them know.

If there was a way, and a significant amount of people would do so, maybe the decision makers would understand it’s stupid…

As others have mentionned downloading the .deb and running it will also work, but I feel nobody gave your a tldr of why you may want to follow those instructions instead, so here it is:

Those instructions configure your package manager (apt) with a new repository for this application.

The upside to that is that anytime you will look for updates, this app will also get updated.

It’s a bit more work up front, but it can pay off when you have dozens of app updating as part of normal system operations.

Imagine a world where windows updates would also update all your software, that’s what this is.

I believe that the existence of ad blockers do change the situation quite a lot.

I also pay for youtube premium. Before doing so I was using an adblocker and didn’t see a single ad before subscribing.

The reason I did so was that multiple creators I was following mentioning that a view from a premium subscriber was worth more to them financially than from a regular one.

It’s the easiest way for me to support multiple creators at once.

The moment my experience decreases, Youtube looses my support and I go Patreon instead. As ublock exists I don’t have to live through ads at all.

I was raised by my grandparents.

My grandfather was the cook most of the time, and he was always trying new recipies he found online: in years, I don’t think I ever saw him cook the same meal twice.

Everytime he’d taste something new, he’d enthusiastically comment “it’s different than usual!” (Rough translation from French “ça fait changment!”)

To this day, I have no idea how good or how bad he thought any of those dishes were.

DDoS are sometimes just people thinking “because I can”, not necessarily motivated by profit.

A smallish scale service like a lemmy server ran by volunteers seems like an easy target, so it wouldn’t be surprising that being the case.