Use freetube, a desktop frontend to invidious that you can import your sub list
Never look back
The whole idea that it violates the terms of service of a company to not let them show things on my screen without my consent is insane. It’s like if every time you went to the grocery store, the employees held you down and force fed you a free sample, then banned you from the store when you started running away from them.
It’s not that bizarre. They don’t have to serve you the content without showing you the ads that make the platform profitable. The freedom goes both ways. I use an ad blocker too, but I don’t think that YouTube is really doing anything wrong here. (Other than possibly ruining their own platform, but that’s their problem that they’re making for themselves.)
If they weren’t a monopoly, I’d agree, they can do whatever they want.
But since they are a monopoly, its a de facto the equivalent of a town square, and they are policing people’s speech, and broadcasting annoying public announcements that nobody wants to hear.
A privately owned platform cannot serve the public good. There will always be conflicts of interest. A proper public square should be funded by a competent government (but those are rare) or decentralized.
i use ublock origin
reddit still good for something: Filter Lists–>uBlock filters–>uncheck the “ublock filters - quickfixes” box and then reload the page.
this worked for me
Awesome.
The day FireFox and UBlock Origin stop working with eachother completely. Might be the day I just uninstall all of my browsers and use my PC more personally than before.
I didn’t screencap it but today on YT I was given a modal that said I was using an adblocker (ublock) and I have three more videos before they require premium. I changed VPN locations and stopped getting the message.
Yup, I use ublock origin and have never had issues on YT.
They do random testing. I’ve received one of these a couple of times with unlock as well. Google/yt has not fully committed.
I hope they don’t commit. But if they do, I guess that’ll be the end of YT for me…
If you’re on desktop, download FreeTube. No more ads, ever. No more jittery youtube videos even though you have 300mbs down, you can download any video in app at max speeds, and its not algorithm fed. I imported my subscriptions, and now if I want to see something new I can use the not broken search function. Its like early early youtube and its wonderful!
Freetube is great but it’s also a source of endless frustration. Like if you walk away from your computer the stream times out and it won’t resume. Then it says “reload” and they never implemented a reload button so you have to navigate to something else. Except their navigation doesn’t work quite right so sometimes if you click too fast it stays on the new page after you try to go back to the one you wanted to reload. Rawr. (GitHub issues 1005, 1425, 1500, 1958, 4062, 4409, 5019, 5152, 6136, 6201)
I use youtube-local which is great, but it’s more susceptible to breakage which is why I’m currently back on freetube and very very very frustrated.
In Freetube, reload is ctrl-R on Linux and Windows, and cmd-R on Mac. I have experienced the fact that if you leave a video paused for a long time (hours) then you need to refresh. If you have history active, after refreshing the video will resume from where you left, which by the way is better then actual YouTube where it will often resume from an earlier timestamp. I have not experienced the other issues you mentioned.
Yeah I learned that when I looked up the issue number, very disappointed that it’s Ctrl+R instead of the canonical reload button for the last 30 years (F5). :(
Since you knew Ctrl+r you wouldn’t experience those issues. That’s a side effect of “reload” without a reload button.
I agree, F5 would have been better since it is the standard on Linux and Windows. The only reason why I found out is because I’m used to do cmd+R on Mac (I use Mac at work so I got familiar with it).
Control r is standard reload for web browsers and other stuff too
But since F5 is and has been for 30 years the universal refresh button I never needed to learn that some software uses a different, undiscoverable key combination.
A week ago YouTube forced me to disable an adblock extension on one of my PCs.
And you know what? Experiencing YouTuve with advertising is the best. It completely breaks my mood interrupting a video I’m watching and I often end up just closing the video and going to do something else like coding or doing something useful at home.
So, I’m here recommending disabling your ad blocker if you are prone to procrastinating like me:)
Originally posted yesterday here https://fosstodon.org/@lig/113747812959094455
What’s the Fediverse YouTube? ooof. that’s a tough nut.
No one understands the astronomical bandwidth, CPU/GPU intensive calcs, and data storage necessities required to do anything close to what YouTube currently does.
There is no way under this warm sun that a fediverse version of YouTube will ever be feasible, unless someone like literally yourself is willing to pay extraordinary high amounts of money for all the required infrastructure and daily maintenance to run it.
I would want to see some data on costs, because I think you might be overselling the difficulty and cost a bit (I don’t actually know, just my good faith belief). Imagine if every content creator ran their own instance. Instead of needing to worry about every user coming to a single group of servers, the Creator only needs to worry about the cost of hosting their own content and the traffic they get.
With the number of YouTubers who have to get sponsorships and Patreon anyway, it doesn’t really seem that infeasible or unreasonable to expect content creators to run their own thing or pay to have someone else to do it. Doesn’t seem like the YouTube money is that lucrative, anymore, so not like it would be all that different, either.
Several tried. Nothing as elaborate as cross dissemination, federation or whatever. But at least 5 to 10 years ago it proved to be almost impossible. Platforms like Rooster teeth, which was 100% subscription based, I think never broke even and still relied on YT ads for the majority of the revenue. Some big and small channels tried to at least just catalog, archive and serve their own videos and the costs still became astronomical really fast. Whenever you see one of those very old channels, most of them don’t conserve copies, let alone original source footage of their entire material. Everyone just delete their videos once they’ve been on YouTube for a month or so now, and they have to download their own videos when they want to reuse old footage.
Storage is cheap today, yes, but video really eats storage at an alarming rate. Specially now that 4k is the standard. So you have to reuse storage over and over. Transcoding is also really fast and optimized with modern algorithms, but it takes specialized graphical cards and data centers charge a premium to use servers with such capacities. Self hosting will never be able to satisfy a moderate demand. Get anything above 100 users simultaneously transcoding videos and a non-specialized server will halt to a grind just on IO calls to hard drives alone.
Once you consider all those factors it is obvious why YouTube is such a miracle.
There’s a very simple solution to this, and I’m honestly not quite sure why no one is doing it.
Make ads voluntary. Make them separate from the rest of the experience.
Make it so that you can watch ads and answer surveys based off of the ads in order to get credits which then allow you to watch videos.
Alternatively, make it so that you can purchase the credits out right.
Everyone fucking wins.
I don’t know why people are so stupid as to not even contemplate the easiest and most satisfying solution to all of the problems.
