Piped – An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube front end
github.com
github.com
Yattee is a good front end app for both piped and invidious for Apple TV (and iOS and macOS but I prefer the browser on those platforms)
Ideally, you could self host only the Piped framework and connect this to Yattee without hosting the WebUI frontend, but without the latter, you cannot create a user for yourself to store subscriptions, and using the provided AIO Docker Images is overkill for self hosting as you are required to purchase and point to DNS records for this system (mostly to the benefit of publically hosting an instance of Piped). Invidious is more suited for this regard, but has issues with parsing some videos and their metadata (usually new uploads for a week, Vevo Music Videos etc.)
Show HN: Firefox add-on to open YouTube videos in alternative front ends - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37881771 - Oct 2023 (128 comments)
Tell HN: Cloudflare Is Blocking Piped - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33667236 - Nov 2022 (120 comments)
LibreTube: Alternative YouTube front end for Android built with Piped - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30746420 - March 2022 (46 comments)
Piped: A privacy-friendly YouTube front end which is efficient by design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27869188 - July 2021 (230 comments)
They will not, that is the whole point of WEI.
I believe they will be very reticent to cut off access to this long tail of users with outdated computers, with no account on shared IPs. As long as this is true, it will be possible to use youtube in contradiction to their TOS. They could lock things down quite tight overnight by requiring people to sign in and use up to date browsers/players, but doing so would threaten their ubiquity.
You're probably right. For my part at least, 720p video from youtube almost always satisfies me (and leaves me with more battery life anyway.)
My go-to instance is: https://yewtu.be/
Occasionally it might be down, but it's easy to find others.
I believe the main difference is that NewPipe is an Android App frontend and Piped is a web frontend with the Extractor library as a core dependency.
Which makes the NewPipe Extractor library a great starting point for building more, different frontend applications.
Disclaimer: I'm no expert and this is an oversimplified explanation.
Anybody hear of this happening or think it's a possibility down the road?
It's probably a grey area. It's hard to claim that I'm acting against YouTube's TOS by using Piped. Aside from the fact that I haven't agreed to them, I'm also not interacting with YouTube.
As for the devs: they're merely writing a proxy. I'm sure some creative lawyer can find a way to portrait this as illegal, but it's likely a stretch.
Also, don't associate your google account with your youtube usage. Problem solved.
So you cannot interact with videos (comment, like..etc) although you can create Playlists that will be linked to your local instance account.
Can't is a strong word. They might not bother, but if you're logged in to your Google account on other services from the same IP they might tie those together. Wouldn't be 100% accurate but if they decided to go nuclear ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Besides, suppose they do block you. What's the worst that going to happen? If you can think of something really bad (e.g. I'm going to lose all my photos) then you should do something to address that. Regardless.
Switching your phone from android or changing an email address with hundreds of contacts over many years is far more difficult and expensive.
Google or Apple for that matter can make life difficult for a single person by banding their account , there is not a whole lot an average person can do to mitigate that risk.
How they classify accounts being related is anyone’s guess .
Do any alt-frontends have that functionality?
I want to embed YT videos on a website, but we would like them to be as private as possible. For example, DDG has a player which shields the watcher from YT's data hoovering.
Any suggestions? Perhaps the search terms I'm using are wrong?
[1]: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=xzTH_ZqaFKI
I feel like a better answer would be alternative platforms.
They have been working towards requiring chrome, but that won’t work unless they close source it and lock down developer tools and apis, which would be a death sentence for chrome.
The future they’re aiming for is that unless you’re using an approved (unmodified) browser on an approved (unmodified) device, you get nothing. It would basically turn large swaths of the internet into a walled garden overnight.
While I applaud the effort of making YouTube less hostile and invasive, the only real solution is to stop using it.
But then I know people want to have their cake and eat it too - let Google pay for all the hosting and bandwidth but want to use alternative clients
edit: iCloud link
[1] https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/d8ee1ef618da423e889272f9c0f...
Any web API can allow multiple clients so I'm a bit lost at why you're so excited about this.
- Youtube Premium: 11.99€/month
- Spotify: 10.99€/month
- Netflix: 15.99€/month
- DAZN: 29.99€/month
Putting together a server to store and serve all this content for myself, my family and even some friends: 750€, on a generous configuration.Germany has this "TV tax" (I think the UK as well) which they charge you 18€/month supposedly to help with the production of the public broadcasting networks. I'd really wish we could turn this into a public fund where we can choose who gets to receive the contribution. It would basically destroy all middlemen in both the private and public sectors.
The obvious problem with such tools is that it may allow bypassing YouTube's ad-wall, and as a website owner I can see why that is problematic. It is bad enough that local GDPR interpretations can practically prevent website owners from monetizing their websites via interest based ads.
For YouTube it probably does not matter as much it would to smaller sites and bloggers, but it is still a violation of their TOS. So, if you want ad-free, consider simply paying.
Besides, I am personally not too worried what Google might be using my data for. Thankfully, Google is owned by a US-based company – I would be more worried if the company was placed in China, Russia, or any other country that does not care about freedom rights at all.
Of course, there is always the risk of data-leaks, and that's a valid point – but then why do we tolerate that the government has data on us!? That's even worse than a company tracking us!!
Internally I paraphrase it as: if everyone does this [action that I intend to do] will it be a good thing. I notionally insert "[everyone] who would wish to".
This situation is like the 'desire path' situation where an authority has imposed a pathway, but many pedestrians choose a different path because that is more useful. Ultimately the unpaved walking route will ride, and could cause a quagmire to form (in UK); should one then take the less practical, imposed, paved walkway?
I think the same conclusion forms for me. No. Because eventually the lack of utility in the imposed pathway will be made clear, and then the flaw will be designed around and utility will be increased.
Some might see this as shortcutting (ha!) the categorical imperative...
So yes, video sharing services need to be financed. But this doesn't mean we just roll over and accept alterations to the fundamentals of the web that make it worse.
Ultimately, my connection is that the whole system of brainwashing (advertising) people to increase consumption, or redirect consumption according to other characteristics besides thrift|utility, is detrimental to humanity (and the Earth) and needs to be done away with.
I'm entirely unconvinced that even this is true. Today's platforms and software are built around control and centralization, which is indeed expensive. But there's an obvious alternate path. Instead of preventing users from downloading media, embrace it. Build ipfs into browsers. Link to videos on ipfs. Add a "pin" menu item right on the browser UI for videos/images so that users can easily save copies of what they like and help serve it. Make it so you can subscribe to a channel by pinning an ipns name so you automatically download and seed new videos you're interested in. Let people pin to their (paid) cloud storage too.
There's a huge design space here. Expensive centralization is a tiny fraction of what's possible.
You may make the argument that YouTube includes music, but the quality and capabilities of the platform are very poor compared to competitors.
$5/mo is about the most I would ever pay.
Ads are psychological warfare against the human mind. Advertising campaigns are designed/directed by unscrupulous mercenaries trained in the latest psychology, willing to use every manipulative technique known to science to manipulate you on behalf of the highest bidder. This mass-manipulation undermines democracy and is broadly harmful to society in general.
The problem is most content creators are only publishing on YouTube, so that is where you have to go. If you are a content creator please publish on peertube so we have options. If you know a creator, likewise encourage them to publish there.
I believe that we will have to adopt some guerrilla tactics to win this war: we need to make it clear to creators that they won't make any money if they continue using Youtube. More people using frontends is a start, making Sponsorblock a feature even better, and I'd say that we should even have to run some pirate Peertube instances to copy the content away.
- legal
- not use YT APIs
- ad-free
can someone help me understand how this works?
The sudden interest/surge in custom YT frontends has inspired me to build a custom TV app with tighter controls.
Does anyone know how they work? Are they using YouTube private API directly, or running a full blown shadow browser and siphoning data into the custom front-end?
Update: edited for clarity
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invidious
[1] https://docs.invidious.io/faq/#q-what-data-is-shared-with-yo...
[0]: https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/NewPipeExtractor
This sort of thing is exactly why I roll my eyes when somebody suggests that it's the sole responsibility of parents to control what their children see online, and that anybody who complains about the state of things is just an irresponsible parent. The nature of tech products conspires to make this virtually impossible for all but perhaps an elite minority of technically inclined parents.. and probably still impossible even for them. Even the simple option of "no computers / internet in this household" is undermined by schools which give kids computers with leaky content blocking and require families to accept this.
Just don't give your kid a phone. If he views content he's not supposed to at school or a friend's house, that's not the worst thing in the world. I can't possibly control every single thing my daughter does because she is her own person. But I can mostly control what she does in our home, and no smartphone is a simple solution that prevents all of these other content-blocking problems. Even if she figures out a temporary way to get around it, that's not the end of the world to me. The larger issue to me is the constant oppressive force destroying a child's brain by having TikTok in her pocket at all times.
I'm fine with YouTube proper, but YouTube Shorts is essentially TikTok in a trenchcoat.
There really, really, really needs to be a way to banish YouTube Shorts in your settings, because for me the alternative is uninstalling YouTube.
And yeah they’re pretty stupid. YT took a bunch of normal videos and cropped them to phone camera dimensions, lol. You can click the author’s name to find the original in their YT page. It’s just idiotic.
As I'm running an ad blocker anyway, I created a custom block rule to remove it.
I assume you're an iPhone user. In Android we don't even have that alternative (at least not out-of-the-box)
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hide-youtube-short...
Alternatively, you can change shorts into regular youtube format:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-shorts-blo...
If it has already showed you your organic recommendations multiple times before, it knows it needs to grab onto something new to try to get you to watching. Since you watched that recent video, that's the best chance it has of getting you to click anything since you've shown direct interest in it. You can click 'not interested' on these and it's pretty good at following that instruction, at least unless your next video is another video similar to it.
The best part is, every so often they show up with "want to watch something different?" which seems to be a list of everything I explicitly said I don't want to watch.