YouTube has recently become a privacy nightmare. With all the AI being introduced to spy on users, and the insane amount of ads YouTube is shoving in your face has led me to quit the platform entirely. I tried going cold turkey, but it’s pretty much impossible because everyone and their dog watches YouTube.

So, I started looking for solutions. NewPipe is a great option for Android devices, but it’s just that, for Android devices.

Then, I found out about Invidious.

Invidious is an alternative YouTube frontend. The gist of it is, you install it on your own server (or use a public instance) and simple replace youtube.com with your Invidious domain. But it’s slightly complicated to maintain. First off, to even have a fighting chance at watching videos, you need a residental (home) IP, period. YouTube automatically blocks all datacenter IPs with a condecending message saying “Sign in to prove you’re not a bot, this helps protect our community”. (more like this helps protect our bottom line :P) Secondly, there’s the fact that sometimes videos just don’t load. For example, age restricted videos just do not work at all. You’re required to have a Google Account to watch those, so it’s impossible.

And there’s even more challenges, specifically for new users of Invidious. There’s no algorithm, so you’re going to have to get used to finding the videos you like. It’s easy once you find a few channels to subscribe to, and that’s the second problem. There’s know easy way that I know of to export subscriptions from YouTube to Invidious. Even then, I recommend just rebuilding your subscriptions since there might be some channels you don’t want to watch anymore. There’s also the issue of picking an instance. Sure, you could host your own but you’d need a server and have to keep in mind everything I said above. That’s why I recommend using a public instance that’s recommended by the Invidious project.

If you want a more YouTube-like experience, I’d recommend using FreeTube. If you want to use it with Invidious though, there’s a few things to keep in mind. First off, the instance you use must have its API enabled, which none of the public instances do (You could use my instance but there’s no guarantee of uptime). Second, it’s a bit slow to update so you might be left with a client that doesn’t work. But when it does work, it works well.

In conclusion, f*ck YouTube and Google in general. Use alternative frontends when you can. I’d recommend LibRedirect to help you out with that.