You might have noticed that even on Firefox (depending on your lists) YouTube may detect uBlock Origin on Firefox now
There’s already a workaround (found, again, here), but I figured I would use this opportunity to tell people that projects like Piped and Invidious exist, which both allow you to watch YouTube without loading their ads, with improved Privacy and (in the case of Piped) even Geoblocking-Circumvention and SponsorBlock out of the box.
They’re both great tools, and using something like LibRedirect you can even automatically go to Piped or Invidious when clicking/opening a YouTube link (and more).
Both don’t load ads, but unless changed in the settings Individous may still make connections to Google/YouTube to load the video(s) themselves.
Bit of a shameless plug for these projects, but I figured this is a really good time to show these projects as I often see people asking what they are in threads on here
I run my own Invidious instance on my local network and its not bad, but you really aren’t able to endlessly doom scroll Youtube recommendations with it. That sounds like a non-issue, but its more difficult to find new content you like without that algorithmic aspect. Technically, Invidious will load playlists, but the UI is designed to maximize the video presence without the other add-ons, so scrolling is a pain. Also, history is unnamed so its just a thumbnail with no other info.
You can change UI of Invidious with Stylus (ex. https://userstyles.world/style/6850/invidious-all-instances-player-and-tabs-v-3), but that won’t run in qutebrowser and I love my native vim bindings.
Ever since I disabled every recommendation in libretube I don’t watch anything on youtube anymore because I have no fucking clue that it even exists.
I’ve been relying on yt-dlp and hint links to pipe video from Youtube to mpv. Its not a bad solution, but isn’t quite the doom scrolling I want. Here’s an example: https://files.catbox.moe/688xbo.png
Yeah, as good as Youtube’s algorithms are at pushing hardcore right-wing content on completely fresh accounts in like 3 clicks, my accounts have been around for so long that my recommends tend to be on the money most of the time.
I discover multiple new channels each month from my recommends whereas 10 years ago I’d occasionally check a channel that a friend recommended or was embedded on a forum post
Hah, it still tries with the right-wing conspiracy garbage though every so often though. Its like “Hey…you wanna watch some hate crimes? No? Uh… uh… ok, here’s the 37min of LOTR facts you asked for…”
Oh, definitely but it’s shockingly bad when using YT without logging in
That’s one of the reasons I like Piped, the video you are currently on does have a small similar-to feed on the side