If you don’t want your experience to suffer from platforms seeking money, pay for services with a stable business plan. Avoid complex services that are free, even with an account. YouTube and Spotify will never be able to give you music for free without something in return.

You can try setting up alternative clients for services with ads, but that’ll be a tiring arms race as a user.

Pay for physical goods (DVDs, CDs) rather than stream. You can stream stuff from your own NAS if you have to, but don’t rely on streaming services to keep stuff around forever. I think Apple has the best track record in keeping content you rent (“buy”) for stuff you can only get through streaming, but I’m not 100% sure these days.

Make regular backups (use that GDPR request button) for large websites so you can keep your data and switch whenever something weird is going on. Also make sure to have backups of whatever cloud drive services you may be using on at least two other places (your local device and a NAS, or your device and another cloud service) in case you get banned.

Something more advanced: use your own domain for email. Various services, ranging from Google to Proton, will host your email for you for a couple of bucks a month. If any of them ever go to shit, move your email to another host and copy over all the old mail. Again, keep backups in case your account disappears all of the sudden; email is built to be resistant against outages of a few hours/days, so you can move if your account gets banned for no reason.

It’s no guarantee, but if you can, donate to the free and open source stuff you use. Many Lemmy servers wouldn’t exist without donations, for instance.

As for general safety, use uBlock Origin, but don’t mix ad blockers, or sites will break.