Personally I’ve been using FreeTube for accessing YouTube as they are FOSS. Only thing I wish they would have a feature to share like subs with Tubular and watch history somehow. It doesn’t have all the platforms Grayjay has but for just YouTube its pretty great
I honestly don’t like default instance approach. I think people should be able to select tags and they’d get communities recommended with maybe a flag of the country where it comes from next to it and like just a list of blocked communities from that home (inaccesible planets) and like a short description. I don’t think lemmy should become as centralised. I like your idea for that approach. If one community shuts down or like the admins or mods act stupid it would suck for users to not have been given a choice.