De-Shittify your YouTube Experience with FreeTube
De-Shittify your YouTube Experience with FreeTube
FreeTube is a feature-rich and user-friendly YouTube client with a focus on privacy.
FreeTube is an open-source standalone YouTube client that gives you control over what to see and what not to see on YouTube. Among my my favourite features are:
- No Ads
- Checkboxes to eliminate common distractions, e.g. Shorts, Trends, Live chat, Recommendations, Comments
- Word filters and channel filters
- Integrated SponsorBlock and DeArrow
- History and subscriptions are saved locally, away from Google's prying eyes
- Easy download of videos, e.g. for securing videos or re-uploading them to a PeerTube instance (of course, only if it's legal in your jurisdiction)
If you're a parent, know that FreeTube also has several child safety features.
why not just https://redirect.invidious.io/
I didn't know about the web interfaces of Invidious instances. Definitey looks cool, and this redicrect domain is handy to quickly find a working instance.
Still, FreeTube has a couple of major advantages. One is that even if your go-to Invidious instance becomes unusable, your local FreeTube configuration (subscriptions, blocks, ricings, you name it) remains 100% in effect, because FreeTube just picks a different instance. Even when Google again makes all Invidious instances dysfunctional, FreeTube may still be usable by accessing YouTube directly. Also, FreeTube likely has A LOT more options—the settings page is quite sizeable. Finally, I find it increasingly nice that it's a standalone client separate from your browser. It makes it more deliberate to start watching videos, so that I'm less likely to go on senseless watching sprees; and conversely, when I'm watching useful videos, I'm less likely to interrupt them by going to some irrelevant website.
It's a good piece of software, but it breaks every couple of weeks because youtube is trying to block third party clients and the team behind freetube has to find another way to patch around it.
For the times it is down, the Freetube UI offers an easy way to "open in <video player of choice>" or "open embedded player", both of which are much better than dealing with the default youtube UI.
It doesn't break that often.
This is great and I appreciate the push to move content over to Peertube. There are a lot of issues with youtube that go beyond just ads. There is a huge moderation problem. For one, there are so many fake DIY videos now. I used to go on there to learn how to do things, but seeing the devolution into ad-supported content that exists soley for the purpose of monetization, spreading completely false information to people is really sad. You can't trust anything on there. None of it has been vetted by people who know what they are talking about at all and there is no reasonable process for removal of such videos. At least Peertube, you could change instances or if you run an instance you could defederate from bad actors on the platform. Peer Tube is an amazing platform and is incredibly under-utilized.
While you're at it..... Try Newpipe sponsor block on your Android phone.
Checking it out, thanks for the recommendation.
I've been a long term freetube user, but lately I'm finding pipeline built locally through AUR, formerly known as feetuber, a much better experience at least for me. I've set it up to use ytdlp and mpv all the time, so I don't care about Piped sites. It supports Peertube already, and it's way light, at least with mpv playing it is