this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

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 don't know if it's the right place to ask.
I don't want a Google account. I don't use yt that much but I still need it.
I even tried yt revanced. None of them works

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 hours ago

PipePipe is on F-Droid

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I've been having issues with NewPipe as of late. I have to keep changing my VPN server until one works

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

I've been having huge problems with Revanced too, anyone else?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (3 children)

Grayjay still works and is being actively maintained. They also support other platforms like PeerTube and Odysee, which you can easily enable.

https://grayjay.app/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago

Still get blocked if on a VPN, have to switch servers, often countries. I usually give up and have it download it (by adding to a playlist that I set to download for auto retries). Then watch it when it's available offline

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Hasn't worked for me for several months. Not with a VPN anyway.

[–] AnAmericanPotato 0 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I've noticed that Google is getting more and more aggressive with VPNs. It won't let me load anything on VPN without logging in. This applies to third-party tools like yt-dlp too.

This probably depends on your VPN provider. Perhaps I can make a throwaway google account just to get it to stfu? I don't know how hard it is to make a semi-anonymous Google account nowadays.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

Requires a phone nunber, at least most of the time

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Depends on how you sign up. If you sign up with Gmail or Google TV they do not, last I checked.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 hours ago (2 children)

Grayjay is great and I look forward to some bug fixes in the next updates. Unfortunately, I also get YT blocking errors mostly when using a VPN (Proton). A side note, for some reason I can't paste links into the search bar, this kind of throws my game off when switching from Freetube or other YT links.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 59 minutes ago)

They released an update yesterday. If that doesn't fix it, please report your issues

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Do you use free tier or paid proton VPN? I am evaluating different VPN options and appreciate the data points

[–] [email protected] 1 points 46 minutes ago

Hey, I paid for a Proton Unlimited package for the second year. After hearing that Proton CEO Andy Yen voiced support for the U.S. Republican Party, I wondered about the company's direction. However, there isn't clear evidence that a Trump administration would be anti-privacy or worse than the Democrats regarding privacy in the U.S. I chose the company because Proton AG is headquartered in Plan-les-Ouates, Switzerland, where its data centers are also located. Additionally, I selected the EU model when purchasing. They have over 110 servers and seem fairly fast compared to my experience with NordVPN over the years. Sadly, in the YouTube field, most of these IP addresses across its global servers have been flagged, and I'm pretty sure I can't even post this reply on lemmy.world without pausing my VPN.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

FreeTube v0.22.1-nightly-5404 Beta with the Local API is working fine for me. Try the latest nightly build.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

Thank you, this fixed FreeTube for me. Guess official releases are too slow now or maybe YouTube is attacking the official release specifically

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

Libretube with HLS experimental on. You need to refresh VPN location constantly if you use one.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I'm not 100% certain if it's fully private, but I've been using a VPN and LibreWolf + uBlock Origin. I watch what I want to and reset my browsing session when I'm done.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

yeah that's probably easily fingerprintable

[–] refalo 1 points 2 hours ago

So far JShelter has been the best single solution I have found, it even prevents creepjs from working at all. Nothing is going to stop casual users from getting TLS fingerprinted though.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

Using Freetube via a personal VPS - never had a problem, maybe because the provider is smaller. Newpipe, however, did have trouble - page had to be reloaded several times before the video showed up. Now trying Pipepipe instead and not seen it repeat yet.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 hours ago

One trick is going to ghostarchive.org and sticking the link in there.

Another is using yt-dlp

Both of these are future-proof because you will end up with the data hoarded off of their server.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Invidious still works very well, however it is an ongoing battle with YouTube. They ban an instance and the instance's ban evasion routine tries again, or in the case of IP range bans migrates to another provider and the game goes on. Despite this, it is the only way I know of to access YouTube relatively pain free using a public VPN provider. By now YouTube has blocked a lot of public VPN IPs. To me, this advantage makes it worth it.

The best way to keep up with which instances are currently functional is via the Invidious Matrix room, https://matrix.to/#/#invidious:matrix.org. You can also check the instances list https://instances.invidious.io/ but it may get out of date sometimes.

Finally, I've found the best way to use Invidious is via FreeTube (Linux) or Clipious (Android).

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Noticed errors in newpipe recently too. Did you try Firefox with ublock? In mobile u can enable background something too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago

Yeah I tried it with fennac

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

even if you find a method.. whats your exit strategy? its inevitable that you will be unable to use it in the near future without an account, just like facebook.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Nebula is decent

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

Honestly: books and PeerTube.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 hours ago

whats your exit strategy?

books

👑

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

You got any good recommendations for an e-reader?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

I have a Boox for when I want a bigger screen, and a Hisense touch (I think that’s the model). I like them both a lot. The Hisense device is also a HiFi audio player which is nice.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I like Odysee but it's kinda controversial due to its conspiracy theories and stuff

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

yeah i find it too difficult to find decent content in there

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

Yes. I've come to peace with that. I would like new pipe to allow me to sign in with a Google account. And I would just rotate Google accounts every month

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

Freetube + socks5 mullvad : works 100% of the time

Newpipe on mullvad, sometimes I have to cycle VPN endpoints if the bot detection gets triggered.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 hours ago

You could go to your local Library. That's always an option.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Shouldn't you be able to access YT without a Google account? So uBO correctly configured (at least on Firefox) should do a lot already. Maybe sharing with us what specific issues you're facing or what you want to be able to do may help you getting more specific solutions?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

They are currently A/B testing blocking access to videos without an account. That's why some people are getting errors. It's likely that it will be rolled out to everyone in the future.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

Oh, thx for the clarification. That certainly would not help.

It looks to me like Google has that idea they own their viewership and can treat them like trash if they fancy doing so. The not too distant future will tell us if they were right or not.

What I can say is that they don't own me. I was a Premium subscriber fir years (I can afford it and I want to support creators) but I cancelled the day they became serious against ad-blockers. For me, it was not about them forcing people to pay a sub. It never was. It was about destroying the free Web and making it a privately-owned something a few corporations would then be able to do what the fuck they wanted with. I certainly did not want to give them a cent more of my money to achieve that.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Well, login gating worked for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (it's not dead yet despite some people's claims). We here are tiny minority of social media users.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

Yep, you're right. I tend to forget that... way too often. [Sad face]

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

that's fun because some of my teachers like to upload their course material to youtube...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

They'll tell you to make an account, what's the big deal, everyone uses Google?
And when you tell them how insane it is to lock access to course material behind a Google account, they'll stare at you blankly.