I want to play the Minecraft 1.16 update with a buddy, but a shader would be nice. As far as I know there's still no Optifine 1.16, can I still play with shaders or is that not yet possible?
No, you have to have optifine to install a shader.
No, you can't. You have to wait until the Optifine 1.16 comes out. But that will take a long time since 1.15 is not even outside.
There's no separate shadermod yet?
You need Optifine for this. So no.