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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

Invidious is a third-party frontend (you can self-host) that solves this problem: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

As a bonus, it is super fast because it doesn't have to justify the salaries of dozens (hundreds?) of frontend developers and can get away with server-side-rendered HTML and minimal amounts of Javascript.

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Your bonus is my primary reason for using the service. Invidious, old.reddit.com, Gmail HTML Mode, are perfect examples of the great user experiences we've lost in the pursuit for New Shiny. Directly comparable with their "modern" counterparts. It would be nice if websites started to offer a cut-down version as an option, especially for users in 3rd world countries.

Is there a browser extension to switch to lightweight versions of web apps like these?

Yep, check out LibRedirect: https://github.com/libredirect/browser_extension

The hero we need

The reddit redesign was just downright horrible and for some reason it’s stayed and we all have to live with it.

You can set to use old.reddit.com in account preferences, and I haven't seen new redesign since I reinstalled windows. That being said, the day the redesign gets pushed off, thats the day I stop using reddit.

old.reddit.com works very poorly on mobile.

There used to be i.reddit.com, for that purpose, but they removed it a month ago or so… I wonder how long old.reddit.com will remain.

Well, I don't want to sound too cynical, but the whole internet works poorly on mobile.

Users have less control over their OS and browser so the experience is much shittier even if you ignore styling which isn't sized for mobile.

If you don't care about logging into Reddit, you can try Libreddit or Teddit as read-only frontends. Bonus is you can use them without JS if that's a concern to you. Libreddit especially works better on mobile IMO

Of course these will probably only work until reddit changes their API, as they announced recently

on mobile I use "Reddit is fun" app and I gotta say its actually better to browse than old reddit on PC

I think you can be pretty sure that if Google doubles down on this, third party clients (as well as downloaders like yt-dlp) will stop working.

Not so fast, at least. IIRC youtube have contracts to keep API stable for a number of years for TV applications.

This has already started, as I found out when my plugin for OSMC stopped working. Here's what YouTube has to say about apps:

https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/12318250?hl=en

Of course, this cat-and-mouse game has been going on since forever, so I wonder if the next step will be downloading ads and then not showing them.

Another alternative is Piped. https://piped.kavin.rocks. Comes with sponsorblock in addition to not showing ads. For Android users, use Youtube ReVanced if you want algorithm recommendations, NewPipe if not.

NewPipe is great. I haven't tried ReVanced in a few months because it was a bit buggy. Has it improved?

Been using revanced (and just vanced) for years and never encountered a bug. What problems have you had?

Piped works great! However it is let down by the (IMO) poor UX design. I would love for some graphics designer to step-in a create more usable CSS stylesheets for it.

Does YouTube get any money from this for their infrastructure costs?

Their CEO just got hundreds of millions of dollars as a bonus. I don't think their infrastructure costs are that big of a worry for them.

Probably not but looks like this Invidious "doesn't scale".

Seems pretty slow actually. Also the search is poor, the player is buggy, and some videos wouldn’t play at all because of format issues.

Seemed fast enough to me, from the one instance I tried (inv.riverside.rocks).

You really have to self-host those services if you want adequate performance. All the public instances are overloaded.

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