As it stands, both Piped and Invidious are dead.
Because od that, I almost completely stopped watching youtube but l’d still sometimes like to check what the people I follow posted (I used to do that via Piped).
Are there any new ways of following people without actually using Google? I’m aware of the tools that download new videos as they come out but I’m more interested in just “subscribing”, kinda like RSS?
Ideally it would be on iOS
Edit: I found it, “Unwatched” on iOS is awesome, thanks to !FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone
I just use yt-dlp and VLC ¯\(ツ)/¯
i “subscribe” via rss in freshrss, just use the normal youtube.com on desktop and mobile browser. StoptheMadness on iOS to strip ads
https://github.com/alexta69/metube and Plex
Newpipe still works on Android.
PipePipe has even more sources.
I thought I was the only one.
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Pump these numbers up brotha
I like that pipepipe provides an option to use a Google account fall back for videos that are age verified, since those don’t work anymore without an account.
And they got a content filter update too so can block channels and keywords.
Unwatched is great on ios.
Whoa, this is it! This is what I’m looking for
This is awesome, thank you!
it’s so pointless
? its pointless to watch videos without it being tracked to an account and with adds removed?
I just use Newpipe
However, Piped and Invidious are not dead. YouTube is trying really hard to kill them but they still work somewhat. It is a cat and mouse game.
They’re effectively dead. I haven’t ever found a single instance that works for more than a few days in years, despite people constantly recommending them.
Probably because people self-host them. I have an invidious instance self-hosted and use clipious on android to watch videos on it. Feels super modern and have pretty much no issues. Public instances usually don’t work because of datacenter ips get blocked by YouTube.
Orion browser works fine for me on iOS
NewPipe or Patched YouTube App using ReVanced Manager
FreeTube still works for my Linux system, for most videos.
“Absolutely proprietary”
Yeah, but at least it’s source available :P
Non-commercial clause, for those who are curious.
It doesn’t allow for forking so it is effectively proprietary. It is critical that the community can fork something when they don’t like the direction.
I agree that’s an important aspect of open source, but for me personally it’s more about being able to audit what is running on my machine. the fact that they show you the code lets me see and confirm for myself that they aren’t doing anything shady like spying. Though it might not be good enough for some people it definitely is for me.
It’s a level of transparency you won’t ever get from truly “proprietary” software.
My concern is that FUTO will start claiming that some other third party clients are stealing the code.
Be mindful that you don’t look at the Grayjay code before contributing to something like Newpipe
it does allowing forking and redistributing, but you cannot remove or obscure functionality related to payments. https://gitlab.futo.org/videostreaming/grayjay/-/blob/master/LICENSE.md
It doesn’t respect the 4 freedoms thus it isn’t foss. Use it if you want but keep in mind that FUTO has full control over the rights of Grayjay.
Oh, I didn’t know that. Yeah, I don’t like that at all.
I use Tubular (Newpipe with Sponsorblock) from polymorphicshade, though lol.
Been a NewPipe user since the very first alpha
My only issue with Grayjay (both Android and Windows app), is you have to manually export the videos out of Grayjay
If you try to grab the files directly, they don’t work.
It hasn’t been working lately. Videos stop at 0:59
That’s a YouTube/VPN thing. Every other app is experiencing the same issue, in my experience.
Aaa you were right thanks! What a relief
Hmm, I haven’t had that issue
Eh fuck it, I’m enjoying freetube now
yt-dlp --sponsorblock-remove all <url>
is the way. It turns playlist link into nicely named, curated video files awaiting to played by a regular video playerDoes “all” remove every type of segment? Because that seems excessive for most people, there is a lot of filler/etc sections that are over-zealously tagged.
That seems like it would screw the creators more than YouTube.
Possibly, but for how ad laiden YT has become it’s a path I’m willing to take.
As others have said, invidious is not dead, and they’re working on factoring out the part that interfaces with YouTube itself, so that updates to react to changes in YouTube will be able to be implemented much faster.
Addressing the subscribing part; I had similar requirements, so I started subscribing via FreshRSS while using a custom theme to give it a YouTube-like experience.
I shared the setup a few month ago here: https://lemmy.world/post/21381606
Edit: One of the benefits of using selfhosted RSS with a web interface is that it is platform agnostic.
No worries! This setup ended up working better than I thought, and I’ve been using it as my primary way of interfacing with youtube.
Grayjay by FUTO has been working well for me
Forgot about that one but it’s only on Android (mobile-wise)
Oh, I wasn’t sure what platform you needed. For iOS, yeah I have no idea. For anyone else that comes across this though, Grayjay also has a desktop app now
Grayjay started shitting the bed on me recently (Android via Samsung and Graphene, and on Desktop Linux/Windows) unless I disable vpn.
Even with Agent andDNS whitelisting for the apps.
A bit of a bummer after recently donating.
That’s not GrayJay. That’s YT. They’ve started blocking access to users who use a VPN without logging in.
God forbid they don’t know everything about you.
Edit: response from FUTO
Seems to be related to UMP streams and we have issue opened for it and it’s top priority for us to fix this now. It is however very complex so it takes time to fix it but at least we figured out why it is happening and once it is fixed it should be a smooth experience on Youtube at least for a while until they change something else on their backend…
Aye, that was my suspicion. Really awesome to be stripped of options for privacy so they can suck down that data.
Yt-dlp still works thankfully.
Revanced and Firefox + uBlock Origin.
First one’s hard to set up, but I’m sure anybody self-hosting literally anything could do it in two seconds.