For those who are want something similar to invidious, you can try youtube-local (not my project, I am just a user). It is a minimal python youtube client, and functions similar to other frontends, but runs locally. You lose some amount of privacy (youtube still has a general idea of who is watching with IPs), but it is not very exact, and there is an option to use tor to get the content. You can also enable sponsorblock, or hide yt-shorts.

I have a question, what are you exactly seeking to repair?, like if you have a good working laptop, and if it gives good performance, then there may not be much need of repairing. One of the reasons for getting repairable hardware is that they last long, like I have laptops which are 13 and 7 years old, and they both “work”, batteries are dead, and replacements are not good, but other than that fine machines. If your laptop is not very flimsy, you may not even need an upgrade for a long time.

well even a raspberry pi would be enough, except for ML

depending on what exactly in ML, and what our the sizes of datasets involved?, like i did some work, but for me 8 GiB RAM was enough, but if you want to do larger databases, you would need somewhat good GPU (essentially large matrix multipliers) with plenty of VRAM

Is there any way i can host the whatsapp bridge but not the matrix instance itself, or something simpler. Even then, it does not really make my situation better. It would be adding one more layer between me and whatsapp, but not much more. As I understand, bridges help when you have multiple platforms, and you want to have one way to access them all, for me, only benefit would be the client would be free

I personally do not use them anything else now, i do have element installed, but when you have no one to talk to, you might as well write messages in a notepad

Whatsapp. I know signal, simplex, matrix, (a billion other things), etc exist that are much better, but where I live, no one uses them, for context, basically everyone, like if you have a phone, you use whatsapp, some government things even happen through whatsapp bots, when people say the word message here, they mean whatsapp. There are about 20-30% (among younger folks) who use telegram, but that is mostly for easier piracy, and larger file sharing (before whatsapp allowed 2 GiB, now they do it habitually). My mom has about a 1000 contacts, and less than 10 of them actually use signal (there are many more who signed up(there was another thing, basically when elon said “just use signal”))

At this point it is not worth getting everyone to switch, the best i have done, is just reducing the number people i communicate with (on whatsapp), and try to just meet in person