Selfhosted

I use a self-hosted invidious instance, and despite the recent issues with Google trying to block them mine works behind Mullvad VPN.

I use the web app on desktop, and Yattee client on my phone/ipad

On Android try NewPipe, but dont expect algorithm recommendations, just the main trending pages. Same for iOS use "unwatched"

grayjay, it's an app developed by Louis Rossman to combine a lot of streaming platforms into one privacy and security respecting app. it does have billionaire backing tho if that yanks your chain

I don't watch a lot of youtube, but DuckDuckGo browser (on Android and Windows, at least) has a Duck Player that removes all of the cruft around videos and is private afaik.

Freetube on desktop works beautifully. They just added playlists too

NewPipe on my phone. I don't have PC I can use rn but when I used to have one I'd just use my browser (mainly Firefox) with ublock origin to watch YouTube (without signing in).

I sub to channels and use Youtubes recommendations and new for you to find additional channels etc but I don't watch them I use Metube and a browser plugin and download the videos to a directory. I don't get all the privacy but I also am not giving them much watch data and I can avoid the ads.

Freetube on Linux, newpipe on android and maybe a private invidious instance.

I just watch it on youtube.com without logging in. Sacrificing convenience and using some frontend that only work if you pray hard is not something I want to do daily-drive

I use YT-DLP to scrip the download of vids I want to watch and it drops them into Plex for me. I set it to run every 4 hours.

I use a private Piped instance

Grayjay

NewPipe or PipePipe.

Self-hosted Invidious or public Invidious instances.

https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

Newpipe or libretube

Grayjay on my Android phone. I like that it supports a lot of different services, and I have subs on Odysee, Rumble, and Nebula (I pay for a sub there). I sometimes download videos for offline use if I'm going to listen on my commute or something (no point in using up data if I don't need to).

On my desktop/laptop, I just use YouTube directly w/ uBlock Origin on Firefox (to block ads) without logging in. I don't watch much YouTube on my desktop/laptop, and when I do, I'll just look for a specific video or whatever.

I also have NewPipe installed on my phone for when I want to find something specific (i.e. background music or something), because Grayjay's search kind of sucks.

youtube-local over a Mullvad (other services like Proton or IVPN are great as well) works really well for me

With invidious and in FreshRSS I use the youtube extension to use the embedded video player, you just need update this part of the code https://github.com/FreshRSS/Extensions/blob/master/xExtension-YouTube/extension.php#L153-L163
It easy just to replace for this:

    public function getHtmlContentForLink(FreshRSS_Entry $entry, string $link): string
    {
        $domain = 'www.youtube.com';
        if ($this->useNoCookie) {
            $domain = 'www.youtube-nocookie.com';
        }
        $domain = 'invidious.personal.com';
        $params = 'quality=dash';
        $url = str_replace('//www.youtube.com/watch?v=', '//'.$domain.'/embed/', $link);
        $url = str_replace('http://', 'https://', $url);
        $url = $url . '?' . $params;

        return $this->getHtml($entry, $url);
    }

The only change is to use $domain = 'invidious.personal.com';
And add the parameter quality=dash

Seems there's also this one https://github.com/tunbridgep/freshrss-invidious
but haven't tried it