Moving away from Google. I just added my fav subs into my rss feed but that isn’t an enough to get good recs. What else can one do? Alternative front ends that work?
I use a self-hosted invidious instance, and despite the recent issues with Google trying to block them mine works behind Mullvad VPN.
I use the web app on desktop, and Yattee client on my phone/ipad
grayjay, it’s an app developed by Louis Rossman to combine a lot of streaming platforms into one privacy and security respecting app. it does have billionaire backing tho if that yanks your chain
Thanks! I’ll check it out. Thanks for yanking my chain
ofc!
+1 on Grayjay. Also Tubular. FreeTube on PC and SmartTube on TV.
I don’t watch a lot of youtube, but DuckDuckGo browser (on Android and Windows, at least) has a Duck Player that removes all of the cruft around videos and is private afaik.
I sub to channels and use Youtubes recommendations and new for you to find additional channels etc but I don’t watch them I use Metube and a browser plugin and download the videos to a directory. I don’t get all the privacy but I also am not giving them much watch data and I can avoid the ads.
Freetube on desktop works beautifully. They just added playlists too
This is awesome!
on the minus side, it’s electron and it doesn’t have tabs, but it’s a rather minor inconvenience for me
Do your subscriptions load well? I just imported mine from freshrss and they’re loading slowly
A couple seconds does it… I have 56 subscribed channels though, that’s not a lot, perhaps loading times scale with this number
Hmm maybe I’ll reinstall. Never loading for me. I can click individual but not all subs
You can check the tracker for open issues, see if you’re encountering a known one
NewPipe on my phone. I don’t have PC I can use rn but when I used to have one I’d just use my browser (mainly Firefox) with ublock origin to watch YouTube (without signing in).
I just watch it on youtube.com without logging in. Sacrificing convenience and using some frontend that only work if you pray hard is not something I want to do daily-drive
I use containers on Firefox to sandbox YouTube, and then have a throwaway account that’s literally just for YouTube and nothing else. Everywhere else on the web, scripts from Google are blacklisted using uBO.
There are some periods where YouTube make changes frequently so that e.g. FreeTube stops working for some time, but for the most part it works reliably well. I would say it provides a much better convenience than watching on youtube.com logged out, as you have profiles, subscriptions, playlist and history. Including adblock, sponsorblock and dearrow, and granular control over what to show or not (comments, shorts, live etc.).
NewPipe or PipePipe.
Been using PipePipe for awhile now and love it. Unfortunately, recently it has not been able to load playlists 9/10 times. Very frustrating. Hopefully it gets a patch soon.
Any problems I’ve had with these apps has usually been solved by reconnecting my VPN.
I don’t have a VPN.
I use a private Piped instance
Can you show your docker-compose? I’ve tried several times without succeeding 🤧
Before anything, you’ll want to create a folder for the unix socket:
mkdir /var/run/ytproxy
and chown it to your reverse proxy’s user and group.The Docker files:
compose.yml
services: piped-frontend: image: 1337kavin/piped-frontend:latest container_name: piped-frontend environment: BACKEND_HOSTNAME: $API_ENDPOINT depends_on: - piped restart: unless-stopped networks: - proxy piped-proxy: image: 1337kavin/piped-proxy:latest container_name: piped-proxy environment: - UDS=1 volumes: - /var/run/ytproxy:/app/socket # unix socket location user: 1000:1000 restart: unless-stopped networks: - proxy piped: image: 1337kavin/piped:latest container_name: piped-backend volumes: - ./piped/config/config.properties:/app/config.properties:ro depends_on: - piped-db restart: unless-stopped networks: - backend_piped - proxy piped-db: image: pgautoupgrade/pgautoupgrade:16-alpine container_name: piped-db environment: - POSTGRES_DB=$DB_NAME - POSTGRES_USER=$DB_USER - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=$DB_PASS volumes: - ./piped/pgdb:/var/lib/postgresql/data restart: unless-stopped networks: - backend_piped networks: backend_piped: proxy: external: true
.env
API_ENDPOINT= # no scheme prefix (ex. pipedapi.domain.example) DB_NAME= DB_USER= DB_PASS=
To configure the reverse proxy (I use nginx), you can use Piped’s recommended files with your domains. The linked repo also contains a template for the required
config.properties
.Let me know if you run into issues, I’ll be glad to help 🙂
You can’t just ask that. Not without at least taking them out to a fancy dinner first. Maybe a little dancing.
My bad 😁
Grayjay on my Android phone. I like that it supports a lot of different services, and I have subs on Odysee, Rumble, and Nebula (I pay for a sub there). I sometimes download videos for offline use if I’m going to listen on my commute or something (no point in using up data if I don’t need to).
On my desktop/laptop, I just use YouTube directly w/ uBlock Origin on Firefox (to block ads) without logging in. I don’t watch much YouTube on my desktop/laptop, and when I do, I’ll just look for a specific video or whatever.
I also have NewPipe installed on my phone for when I want to find something specific (i.e. background music or something), because Grayjay’s search kind of sucks.
Not Foss so if that’s something that matters to you I would recommend you look elsewhere
Grayjay is source available, which is better than nothing. I’d prefer FOSS, but the features make up for the poor choice of license.
So is Windows XP
That doesn’t mean much
It’s really not. Windows XP had its source leaked, it’s not source available. Grayjay is source available, so I can see every new commit before it hits my phone. That’s a pretty big difference, and it’s the most important when it comes to public security audits.
You aren’t legally allowed to do anything about a bad commit so it is meaningless
That doesn’t follow. If there’s a bad commit in Windows 10 or 11, I won’t even know about it. If there’s a bad commit in Grayjay, I can:
- not upgrade, or downgrade to an unaffected version
- report the issue on their issue tracker
- technically violate the license by patching it myself and building my own copy (probably fine provided I don’t distribute changes)
I can do exactly none of that with most proprietary software, so this source-available license is much better than those. Again, it’s not ideal, but considering it the same as every other proprietary software license is absurd.
youtube-local over a Mullvad (other services like Proton or IVPN are great as well) works really well for me
With invidious and in FreshRSS I use the youtube extension to use the embedded video player, you just need update this part of the code https://github.com/FreshRSS/Extensions/blob/master/xExtension-YouTube/extension.php#L153-L163
It easy just to replace for this:public function getHtmlContentForLink(FreshRSS_Entry $entry, string $link): string { $domain = 'www.youtube.com'; if ($this->useNoCookie) { $domain = 'www.youtube-nocookie.com'; } $domain = 'invidious.personal.com'; $params = 'quality=dash'; $url = str_replace('//www.youtube.com/watch?v=', '//'.$domain.'/embed/', $link); $url = str_replace('http://', 'https://', $url); $url = $url . '?' . $params; return $this->getHtml($entry, $url); }
The only change is to use
$domain = 'invidious.personal.com';
And add the parameterquality=dash
Seems there’s also this one https://github.com/tunbridgep/freshrss-invidious
but haven’t tried itLibretube with a vpn! Newpipe doesn’t look great imo
Self-hosted Invidious or public Invidious instances.
NewPipe