When it works, yes.

Ah fuck I should've known lol

Google intentionally changes how to access YouTube content, so it isn't the fault of the programs, though sometimes takes weeks for an update to make it useable again. And once Google requires a login to watch ANY content at all, it's game over.

Yeah I definitely get that and have seen it before with other apps. I don't blame any of them for it. I think it's pretty telling that I pay for Premium and still want a different front end. In my opinion they've ruined the UX. It's way too cluttered with bullshit I don't want to see and can't hide forever.

And their algorithm has went into retard land. They only show me the same three channels I happened to watch a few times in a week. I have to intentionally sift through a million notifications or manually search a channel to see anything else. I have to respect the lengths they've gone to fuck up something that once worked pretty well. Like it takes real talent

Freetube still kind of loses on privacy when using the youtube backend, since invidious is basically dead. Yeah you don't have ads or the youtube client code, but you're still contacting google servers with the content you watch. They have very aggressive rate limits, require session cookies (which can track your watching habits), and aggressive IP-based banning. You can't watch 18+ rated content, which turns out to be more than I thought, comedy most obviously. There really is no way to get away from it anymore. Most solutions require a clean residential IP, and a cookie of some sort, pooled (from community services) or linked to an account. Using local downloading tool like pinchflat at least hides your watching patterns from Google, instead of knowing exactly when you watch a video and roughly where in the stream where you started/stopped, they can just see you downloaded a set of videos a 12am every day, regardless of if/when you watch it.

> And once Google requires a login to watch ANY content at all, it's game over. This is already the case if you aren't using a clean residential IP with a high trust score.

The doors are closing even faster than anticipated. Good. It was going to happen anyway.

I've used youtube-dl before, but I didn't realize there were automated tools for that method. Interesting. Of course Google doesn't like any of this and will always fight it. And I don't even necessarily blame them since I'm probably one of maybe three people on earth who do this AND pay for Premium.

Yup. I can't use YouTube on the official app or without ad blockers. Utterly terrible.

Yeah. I have to cycle my VPN sometimes.

I wasn't signed in recently and the ads were absolutely soul crushing. I just couldn't use it like that. Terrible.

Yeah. It's so awful.

I'm giving evil people my money to fund their exploitation of my privacy for further monetization. Ytdlp and pinchflat both require accounts (for which you must extract cookies) if you subscribe to more than like 5 channels even on a high trust residential IP.

I have no experience with either one of those to comment on how evil they are, but there is no perfect solution at this point. My perspective on YouTube in general right now is that I get more value than I lose. Yeah I wish video hosting was better, but no one is going to just give it to people for free. I pay for Premium to at least try to incentivize an alternative. That's the only alternative; people paying for shit with money instead of everything else

We can only watch youtube because Google allows us to. They have already flexed their control over chrome browsers (70%+ market share) with manifest v3, not to mention a majority of viewership is via apps. Invidious and many other 3rd-party yt mirrors became useless somewhere in 2023.

> Yeah I wish video hosting was better, but no one is going to just give it to people for free That's the lie. It never has been, and never will be. They lied when they made it free, to capture users, then abuse their trust and exploit their privacy to fund it, among every other project that operates at Google. It's the definition of enshitification.

Yes, Google allows people to access the servers they own. I don't have an issue with that (in an ownership sense) and there's really no way to not have that without collectivizing everything involved in it. That's true even of Nostr, seeding, etc. Someone is paying to store and serve data and they can control the terms of access for their own hardware. I'd prefer the latter, but hardly anyone is doing that right now. At least not at a scale that would replace YT in my life.

Yeah I agree with that fully. It's a trap. Fortunately, it seems like that lie is falling apart in various ways. Maybe I'm mistaken, but the products that went with that strategy don't seem like they're doing better than ever. I think a lot of people are hungry for better. I am. My central issue with something like YT is not them making money as a video hosting platform. But that isn't what it is. They want to fully control the actual network. Things like Nostr have the same resource constraints, but you can't prevent me from running my own infrastructure on the same protocol. YT can. Like I can't just compete with them on that, so they can do whatever they want.

Google doesn't allow you to access services they own in any honest way, that removes all exploitation, regardless of price. They don't get to have both and still be considered a net positive to humanity.

Because it's almost if you told people honestly what you did with the information they collected on people their might be a revolution at Google's doortstep.

> My central issue with something like YT is not them making money as a video hosting platform. No one is disputing this, or at least not anyone with a basis on the modern capitalist reality. > Things like Nostr have the same resource constraints, but you can't prevent me from running my own infrastructure on the same protocol. YT can. Like I can't just compete with them on that, so they can do whatever they want. Yes and companies like Google were forced to pioneer these things, but they did it on a lie, just like AI is doing now. People look at me in absolute shock when I tell them you can pay for LLM access. They honestly don't see that the most resource intensive technology to ever have been created might cost a few bucks per month. That's because if you told them the truth of what it actually cost, they probably see it as a net positive. Not all progress has to be built on a lie like this, although it's a fair argument to say it has for many large events in history. I could serve 10,000 concurrent video streams with 1KW of power and $7000 worth of equipment with 99% uptime. OR I could maybe have a single text conversation with a smarter spell check for the same price.

*They'd probably NOT see it as a net positive.

I guess what I'm saying is. At some point you can't keep looking the other way. I've done it for a long time.

I'm currently investigating how I can at least limit my exposure to YT. I'm not leaving it entirely ATM. But I'd certainly like to. I'd actually pay more than their premium price to have a respectful alternative. But there aren't enough people like us, so the best I feel I can do is slowly fade them out. Right now that's looking like I'll have to use multiple things and I'm kind of okay with that.

When using something like pinchflat, I give myself a week for most channels to auto-delete. Other educational accounts/playlist I store indefinitely, as things like MIT and many other university courses are open licensed making them legal to download and store. It adds quite a bit of friction to my watching experience I slowed down a lot. To the point where I maybe watch ~3 hours of content/week. And I would have no shame in increasing that as I don't consume any other media, no podcasts, no tv, movies etc. You can use uBlock origin to block google/youtube links so you can't accidentally watch things. You can add this to your My Filters list ||youtube.com^$all ||ytimg.com^$all ||youtube.com^$all ||youtube-nocookie.com^$all ||youtubei.googleapis.com^$all ||youtube.googleapis.com^$all

The other thing with ytdl/pinchflat that adds friction - there is no discovery outside of word-of-mouth. Pro - can't get hooked on new channels easily Con- can't algo discover new content that might interest you Reading/writing helped me get past that. Now, if I want to watch something, it requires intent. I had to think on my own about what content would interest me, then decide if I have the server capacity to keep the channel around. Real world constraints force decisions XD

I kind of dig that honestly. Especially since, as noted previously, the algorithm seems to just pin you into whatever you watched recently. It clearly was updated to keep me on as long as possible. So it just feeds me that. This doesn't serve me. It serves YT. It used to at least be a mutually beneficial thing, but the incentive was to go all the way in their favor without regard for my wellbeing or interest. The feed became the loop. And we've seen this over the years with things like "click the notification bell". So we all knew it was happening. They forced the notification section into the feed. And it's so unusable that I just don't, so now I'm shown the same four videos. So it's basically already what you're describing. I have to manually find what I want anyway. Might as well do it on my own system that I control.

*they forced the feed or home page into the notification section

Those real-world constraints are the reality that these companies tried to hide with the free lie. The cost was literal life hours and psychological/biological manipulation to pay for it. Now we have psychological, biological, social and economic problems just so people don't have to pay for content.

Yep, I remember last I used it, it was almost impossible to find content by people I was subscribed to. They'd bury it because id watch it, be content, then get off. Instead they want you stuck to the screen, and it works, as long as you let it. It's a natural human behavior that every normal human is vulnerable to, which is then exploited for their benefit, without regard to my quality or as you said, wellbeing. Which is when I transitioned to use the word evil.

That's completely accurate XD

So what all are you doing as an alternative? I'd like to investigate more. I thought you were calling ytdl evil, but I may have confused your meaning.

I don't like any of it, but I also do find value in some of the channels I follow. That's the pinch I'm in. I don't want YT, I want them. But I can't force them into alternatives either. I may just have to give them up. I'm willing to consider that. But I'm currently searching for a way to not have to.

FreeTube at least helps me breathe a little from a poor ass UI perspective, but you're right that it doesn't address my much larger issues.

No Google is. Youtube requires cookies with ytld if you make more than a handful of connections/hour, even on a high trust score IP. So to use pinchflat/ytdlp you need to create an account and extract it's cookies, then use those cookies to download/fetch content. All of your downloads link an IP to an account, so they can see with regularity what content you download, but they can't know when you watch it. It decouples the viewing behavior from the content. They just assume you watch it on the interval your downloads are set to. Ideally they can't see that your on the toilet, in the car, or at work anymore. To get the cookie, you need an account, which needs a working cellular phone number (voip nor temp SMS solutions will not work) to create an account. So it can be personally linked to you. Otherwise youd need a way to rotate your IP to trustworthy IPs (tor doesn't really work, and most popular vpns are well known and blocked). I was only able to get this working with a "fake" account, cookie, over proton US-based vpn only.

Freetube is fine when it works. After about 2 months of it not working I uninstalled it and switched. I had too many issues with youtube blocking me then invidious going down etc. Newpipe still works on mobile for now when I need to actually go find a video. Newpipe is the only way I can browse anymore.