Annoyed by Youtube’s adds? Ever increasing limitations, unnecessary changes, terrible algorithms, price increases and whatnot? You’re in luck, there’s no lack, here’s the hack!
It’s been about three years since I last used Youtube… or is it 4 years? 5? I can’t even remember. I sometimes here things about Youtube having longer and longer ads, unskippable ads… what even are ads? There’s something much better, called Invidious. It’s an alternative Youtube front end, fully free(as in freedom, and gratis) and open source. It’s hosted by techie people, and everyone with the know how can have an instance. In other words: there’s redundance. If one service has issues, others might still be running. How does it work? For the user, it’s a similar but cleaner experience. On the backend, the traffic is proxied, i.e. it goes from Youtube to someone else (the instance’s server), which filters out the bad stuff, and then the video is sent to you.
The Official website is invidious.io, but more interesting is instances.invidious.io which holds the data of currently active instances. As of writing, there are six active instances. Nadeko has been up for years at this point, and so has Nerdvpn. They also have other interesting projects.
So why would you use it? Well… why wouldn’t you. To save sanity, save time, be shielded from Youtube thumbails and algorithms,…
The best part: you can make accounts, and then subscribe to channels (you’re not actually subscribing, but you’ll still see videos from the channels in the bell tab at the top.
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