Customize YouTube to work exactly the way you want it to.

I’m using this all the time myself. There is no login to YouTube required and it supports adding subscriptions and doing everything important you can do on YouTube.

And the best part is no ads whatsoever.

  • Nima@leminal.spaceEnglish
    113·
    2 months ago

    i constantly gotta swap invidious instances because youtube is being relentless in their war against invidious.

    but the ui is awesome and I use it every day.

      • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        31·
        2 months ago

        It seems to be at random, and many of the instances don’t work correctly. You’re better off finding one that does, and setting it as default.

        • dan@upvote.auEnglish
          3·
          2 months ago

          Or host your own :) less likely to be blocked by Google if it’s just you using it.

    • wulf@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      2 months ago

      Invidious is awesome, if possible, self hosting one in docker is great and keeps it up to date

    • kinship@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      How do I go about doing that (finding a good one and setting it up)? Its been a month that either the video loads or it doesn’t and when it does work it is extremely slow to the point I can’t watch on 1080p.

      • Nima@leminal.spaceEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        honestly I keep a tab open with the list of invidious instances open. because every day I usually have to change the instance. or swap it around.

        invidious is fighting youtube very hard, but youtube is fighting back. so its difficult to keep up with.

        i would keep an eye on the invidious instances list. and change to a different one if need be.

  • doodledup@lemmy.worldEnglish
    582·
    2 months ago

    Am I the only one that hates third-party clients for Desktop? They all have terrible UI and UX. Firefox + UBlock + Youtube is the way to go. For the phone it’s NewPipe or Grayjay.

    • xthexder@l.sw0.comEnglish
      11·
      2 months ago

      Personally I still use the Firefox + uBlock + SponsorBlock + YouTube combo on my phone too. Maybe if I watched more YouTube on my phone it’d be worth figuring out an app with a better mobile UI, but I like that it’s a consistent experience anywhere I watch from.

    • Psythik@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      Don’t forget about Enhancer for YouTube, SponsorBlock, and DeArrow! They’re all a must-have for desktop YT.

    • EngineerGaming@feddit.nlEnglish
      41·
      2 months ago

      I used to think it is redundant too, but now see it as a quality-of-life difference. Because I can track my subscriptions and watch history, as well as have playlists. That is a massive improvement over folders of bookmarks.

    • Kanda@reddthat.comEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      I use Firefox with ublock on desktop, works like a charm. My favourite on android is YouTube revanced

      • dan@upvote.auEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        ReVanced isn’t a third-party client though. It’s patches applied to the official client.

    • fross@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      Revanced app had the superior UI/UX.

      Not because if taste, but because it is the YouTube UI that then allows you to add and remove stuff from the UI, getting away from all the user-hostile stuff. If you want to.

    • daq@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      I use the same combo on my phone without any issues or ads. Why use a client on the phone?

    • leadore@lemmy.worldEnglish
      31·
      2 months ago

      Firefox + UBlock + Youtube is the way to go.

      Unless you don’t like Google tracking everything you watch on youtube, that is.

      • person420@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        Let’s be real, no matter how you’re watching YouTube, if you’re accessing the video directly and not cached through a third party server, Google is still tracking you.

    • PenisDuckCuck9001@lemmynsfw.comEnglish
      21·
      2 months ago

      If you use ublock origin and watch a lot, they’ll eventually put your ip address on a list where you have to log in to watch anything. Newpipe seems to be able to circumvent this but yt-dlp can’t. I haven’t tried freetube but maybe freetube can circumvent that.

    • Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      Youtube/google/alphabet are almost certainly aware it exists already. The only real risk is too many people switching to it.

      But even then there isn’t much they can do to stop it’s use. They can’t tighten up or remove their api, but then page scraping will take over. They can obfuscation their page, but that will not work forever.

      It’s a cat and mouse game that is impossible to win for them.

      • nforminvasion@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        You know the same thing was said with Beeper’s imessage on Android pytorch success. “Apple won’t be able to change this. They’d have to change the very nature of imessage itself to block this!” And then, two days later it was blocked completely so, as much as I would hope Google couldn’t block FreeTube, don’t expect such huge successes without tempering expectation.

        • Olgratin_Magmatoe@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          I can’t say I’m familiar with that particular event. But I’m guessing there is a difference there in that iMessage is well, a messaging service. YouTube isn’t, their videos are on public webpages.

          All Freetube and company needs to do, if it comes to it, is find a way extract a video from a public webpage. There’s a million ways to do that.

          iMessage is not a public webpage, and so there is no real way around it unless you go through their api.

  • powermaker450English
    44·
    2 months ago

    The best part about FreeTube unlike other Third-Party clients is that it retains a better YouTube-like suggestions system for any videos you wanna watch next. Discoverability is still a very important thing for me

  • SmileyBMM@feddit.nlEnglish
    36·
    2 months ago

    I prefer NewPipe/Tubular so much that I don’t even use my desktop for YouTube anymore.

    • Pringles@lemm.eeEnglish
      53·
      2 months ago

      NewPipe stopped working for me some time ago, switched over to rvx which seems to work fine.

    • Nima@leminal.spaceEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      i would like to say I prefer Newpipe, but those guys have a pretty annoying bug that’s been going on for years now and it’s still not been fixed.

      If you watch a video and then go back to a list and scroll up to the top, the app crashes.

  • _sideffect@lemmy.worldEnglish
    29·
    2 months ago

    My lg tv is jailbroken so I have the ad blocked version of YouTube on it, but I was on my Chromecast with Google tv yesterday and decided to go back to the regular YouTube app since I was there.

    I was watching a video of 20 minutes in length, and got one 30 second ad at the start; ok fine.

    After 4 minutes, they decided to show me a 50 second unskippable ad.

    I backed out of the video, and deleted the regular app.

    Fuck Google.

  • ContrarianTrail@lemm.eeEnglish
    164·
    2 months ago

    The recommendation algorithm is the reason I use YouTube. Well over half of the videos I’m watching are from channels I’m not even subscribed to. Ads can be blocked as always.

    • dan@upvote.auEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      The recommendation algorithm is the reason I use YouTube.

      This is an unpopular opinion on Lemmy (since it means Google has to track you) but I agree. I’ve discovered so many great channels, both small and large, through YouTube recommendations.

  • sorrybookbroke@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    12·
    2 months ago

    Oh shit, I just made the switch and I’m liking it. I just “favourite” things from my sub feed in one small window, and watch in the other, and it autoplays (if I want) so I can just start doing shit while the background vids keep playing. Honestly kinda more convienient than youtubes gui. It has sponsorblock built in too, which is nice

    • 1984@lemmy.todayOPEnglish
      51·
      2 months ago

      Since they are integrating a web browser in the app, it kind of make sense here actually. For code editors though, not great…

      • noodlejetski@lemm.eeEnglish
        11·
        2 months ago

        Since they are integrating a web browser in the app

        are they, though? I thought they just grab whatever data Invidious API fetches and display it with their method of choice, similar to how mobile clients for Invidious and Piped work. PlasmaTube manages to do similar thing without becoming a single purpose web browser.

      • dan@upvote.auEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Since they are integrating a web browser in the app,

        You can do this in a better way by using something like Photino or Tauri that uses the OS’ native browser engine. There’s no need to bundle a browser with every app (like Electron does).

  • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.socialEnglish
    7·
    2 months ago

    I agree; between it and Tubular, YouTube is usable again.

    That said, someone pointed out that higher resolutions are not viewable on FreeTube. I hadn’t noticed this until they mentioned it, and now I notice it constantly. I don’t know why, but it’s demonstratable: find a 4k video on Tubular, and open the same video on FreeTube, and only lower resolution versions are available.

  • Moe@forum.moe.onlEnglish
    1710·
    2 months ago

    For some reason like recommendation algorithm, I still use youtube premium.

      • dan@upvote.auEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        If you use premium, the creators still get paid by YouTube for your views. If you use an ad blocker, they don’t get any money from your views.

        When you see an ad on YouTube, the creator gets 55% of the revenue and YouTube gets the remaining 45%.

        • EngineerGaming@feddit.nlEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          If I want to support the creator, I would rather donate directly or subscribe to the person’s Patreon. YT Premium just gives no extra features for Youtube itself so could not justify paying.

          • NecroParagon@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            For some reason I doubt that’s a common practice with people hellbent on not seeing ads and not paying for the service.

            Color me surprised if I’m wrong about that.

            I use youtube music everyday as well as downloading videos on my phone to play without wifi. So maybe I do use some premium features, which may make me biased.

            • EngineerGaming@feddit.nlEnglish
              1·
              2 months ago

              I don’t subscribe to anyone, but have donated to the authors I like, just as I did to the FOSS projects I use. One blogger even has a site where you can tie your donation to a specific video of his.

              And for Youtube Music - RiMusic does just what you described but does not require a Google account or a recurring payment.

        • null@slrpnk.netEnglish
          10·
          2 months ago

          If only someone would write an article about it with those details in it.

          Oh well.

  • Elven_Mithril@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    71·
    2 months ago

    yeah I agree! My wife would hear bitchin me if we would watch something on her iphone as i would constantly point out the fucking ads… I use in on my Fedora but sometimes (like once a month) I have a problem with the invidous instances. I wish there would be something similar to use on android, bu fortunately with Firefox& SponsorBlock it seems to block most of them…