Heads up w/ Youtube front-ends:
Invidious doesn't work right now,
But FreeTube does
Note: A lot of the same videos are on Odysee, and you can use farside.link to serve you new front-end instances. So it’s quite possible you don’t even need Youtube, but if you do then:
FreeTube is a desktop app getting it directly from Google, (so it doesn’t hide your IP), while as before:
Invidious was a website viewed in a browser, that’s hosted on a VPS. The community volunteer VPS hosts and official team are trying to resolve the issues Google’s purposefully created to force views of ads and do surveillance.
First Piped then Invidious and soon FreeTube. No point fighting that battle, I gave up on Youtube privacy frontends.
Still one has to enter a server to watch (not that many left out there) and disable the proxy through invidious option.
just started using FreeTube a few weeks ago. I really like it.
Grayjay has always been the most consistent for me
Same. The Greyjay team is usually very quick with fixes, rendering Google's cat and mouse game practically moot for end users. It's worth paying for, but you're not forced to pay.
I really like what they are doing over at Futo. 🤞
FreeTube is fantastic. I use it on a daily basis and that's the only way I really use YouTube at this point. I understand why people like Invidious, but FreeTube can route through randomized Invidious instances whenever it's fixed, and even when it's broken, FreeTube has its own API as you mentioned. At this point, I just use FreeTube on desktop and Grayjay on mobile. Since I started using that setup, I haven't had too many issues with YouTube blocking me.
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