I dusted off an old laptop, put debian on it, put an SSD and now I have my own invidious instance, among other services…
No ads, no throttling, no bullshit. Google is very welcome to suck it. I’d gladly stop using youtube, but there’s no competition.
I know it’s a pain, but what’s to stop us from using download-clis? In theory I could “collect” the urls that are recommended to me from my home page, call the clis, click all the videos to update my recommendations then close the browser.
I know it’s a pain, but what’s to stop us from using download-clis?
The answer is right there.
I do not care. I only watch 10 channels and these are in my favorites. I do not use the algorithm and thanks to European law the frontpage is deactivated. I also ever watch only one video per day and then do something else, so they can slow down the website as much as they want since I am not scrolling. I click on a channel and on a video, that’s it. If it gets too bad I rather not use Youtube anymore, it is not the end of the world.
I am for sure one of the smaller number of people doing this, but I watch YouTube on my TV using the TV app. As a result I always had to watch ads. I wish I could avoid them. I suppose a could watch from an alternative and then AirPlay it to my TV, but that’s about it.
Changing your router DNS to something that blocks ads (or a pihole at home) and you’ll never have to watch ads ever again, YouTube or elsewhere
YouTube video ads can’t be blocked with just DNS blocking unfortunately, they are served from the same hosts as YouTube videos.
Trying to use it via Firefox is pointless. I just downloaded the video and pirated. Fuck YouTube.
If you run
mpv https://url
it will stream it from youtube and play it in mpv, without having to wait for the whole video to download first.