Many YT privacy frontends are down it seems. YouTube is cracking down on these servers fast. Both Invidious and Piped services are not working now.
So how are you watching videos now? Just plain youtube[dot]com with unblock and VPN?
I use https://freetubeapp.io/
I personally think Freetube is the best for desktop right now. Recently, there is also grayjay for desktop. The UI is still buggy IMO, but also seem promising.
But GreyJay isn’t libre.
That is a fair point. Source first software isn’t a part of FLOSS, but even in worst case scenarios it still can be considered as “source available”. Which is better in term of transparency compared to closed source App. OP asked for “private” way to watch Youtube not open source way, so I think grayjay could still be a great choice. We are talking about watching from YouTube which is a corpo closed source spyware anyway.
but wait a second. Privacy is good because it is a Freedom. And because it make Freedom as a whole more possible. But using software with which you have no freedom, kind of defeats the purpose. Like you gain +1 freedom points and lose -1 freedom points. It’s net zero.
Transparency is good to see privacy, but if it is not Libre, you are not gaining any freedom.
I just woke up, I don’t know if I am making any sense
Freetube and GrayJay
I’ve had a good experience with GrayJay. It’s a bit young and missing features but it’s never broken for me.
Btw, they also have a desktop app, but it’s currently in beta.
FreeTube is more stable for desktop.
I’ve been using their GrayJay desktop app, and I’ve enjoyed it so far.
I haven’t checked out FreeTube but maybe this is the push I need.
Downie.app (MacOS) and yt-dlp (multiplatform).
I am not watching YouTube content while these are blocked. I will not watch stupid ads. I will not submit to shitty platforms that suck. Until these work again, there is no YouTube.
I’m finding other ways to fill my free time during the holiday break. I’ll have a bevy of new content to watch when they’re updated.
At this point we should just start torrenting YouTube. Like fuck YouTube.
At this point we should just ditch YouTube entirely, but alas.
FreeTube is a useful project as it allows you to “fallback” on a non-preferred frontend.
https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube
This allows you to continue to use Youtube irregardless of which frontend is (potentially not) working.
In ‘Settings > General’ you’ll want to select “Invidious API” as your “Preferred API backend” and specify your favorite invidious instance in the “Current Invidious Instance” field and click “Set Current Instance as Default”. This locks FreeTube into the specified instance.
Then, when you notice that FreeTube is issuing notices to you about your favorite Invidious Instance being down, you can wander back to ‘Settings > General’; hit the “Clear Default Invidious Instance” Button and wait as FreeTube magically contacts the “https://api.invidious.io/” page for you and selects a new, and hopefully online and working Invidious instance. (You may have to hit this button several times to roll a working instance, Hit the button, check the subs page and see if everything loads, repeat if it falls back on the Local API.)
When you run into instances where you can’t roll up a good Invidious instance; the built in Local API is running a NewPipe Extractor like API directly from your FreeTube client. Not the best; but at least it keeps things working while you wait for the Invidious devs to fix things up; and it still reasonably preserves as much of your privacy as it can while doing this to the best effort it can.
…Sadly this doesn’t work when Google manages a double combo of breaking both Invidious and NewPipe; but I have found that this is less often the case and the devs of either project are usually fairly quick about getting fixes out. Bless their hard work with a donation sometime maybe, if you can.
There are several way, honestly. For Android, there’s NewPipe. The app itself fetches the YouTube data. For PC, there are similar applications that do the same such FreeTube. Those are the solutions I recommend.
If you’re one of those, you can also host your own Invidious and/or Piped instances. But I like NewPipe and FeeTube better.
NewPipe needs VPN or Tor for privacy which usually gets blocked
That really depends on your threat model. The app isn’t monitoring your activity or has imbedded trackers. It pulls content directly from YouTube’s CDN. All they (Google) know is your IP address, but nothing else. For 99.9% of people that’s totally ok.
