Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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I discovered that I watch enough YouTube to warrant paying for a premium subscription. I've turned off viewing history (after one video, so the homepage renders).
This isn't a solution for everyone, but it works for me.
Searching Videos on FreeTube but watching these in the SMplayer, because FreeTube lists theVideos, but often don't play it. SMplayer works almost always, Also possible open the Video copying the URL in it. Another possibility is searching the Video with Andisearch and watch it there in the search results sandboxed and anonym with the random proxies which use Andisearch.
I feel like most have misunderstood the point of the question, they offer to use newpipe, yt-dlp and the like, but those aren't private, they just allow you to watch without signing in, just as you could through the official website with maybe uBlock origin, you're still exposing your IP.
The only fitting suggestion I saw is that of downloading from invidious through yt-dlp, which sounds pretty neat, I had no idea you could when the web frontend is apparently not working
I feel like most have misunderstood the point of the question, they offer to use newpipe, yt-dlp and the like, but those aren’t private, they just allow you to watch without signing in, just as you could through the official website with maybe uBlock origin, you’re still exposing your IP.
This implies invidious and piped hide your IP address, which I'm not sure is true.
I personally use libretube (with piped proxy disabled in settings) with proton vpn. If it shows the "sign in to confrim your not a bot" mesaage I just swap vpn servers.
I wish we had some sort of way to copy videos from YT to PeerTube on some sort of on-demand way.
Like tell PeerTube the video you want, wait a few minutes, and then its available for everyone. Then it auto deletes after X days if it has had 0 views.
Edit: oh man, you could even have a Lemmy bot do this automatically when it sees a link to a YouTube video.
On mobile, Firefox plus ublock works well. There are a few issues like losing your position if the page reloads, but it works pretty consistently otherwise.
I also use NewPipe, but Google breaks it fairly regularly.
Downie.app (MacOS) and yt-dlp (multiplatform).
I am not watching YouTube content while these are blocked. I will not watch stupid ads. I will not submit to shitty platforms that suck. Until these work again, there is no YouTube.
I'm finding other ways to fill my free time during the holiday break. I'll have a bevy of new content to watch when they're updated.
Actually, I have never used piped and invidious to watch the videos themselves. I use them just as subscription feeds and in case I need to search for some video, then I toggle a script I have, I copy the links to the videos I want to watch and I untoggle the script. Then the links I copied start playing on mpv. I don't like to overload piped and invidious services, which I would say is the main reason for them to be shut down, when I can watch/download the video through mpv-ytdlp on my own. Although, I don't know if that answers your question.
Yes its okay if you're using a VPN for downloading which makes your IP untraceable by Google Servers. Currently I am using freetube with VPN. But I need to choose a server that is not used by many for getting around 'you need to sign in' issue.
I use a bot on mastodon named birb rss-parrot.net . It sends me a link of new videos from creators I follow.I directly open the link with Tubular (newpipe fork) or freetube and download it to watch later.
PipePipe on mobile works fine.