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YouTube's plan backfires, people are installing better ad blockers
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this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2023
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It pushed me more towards degoogling. Was already using newpipe on Android and ignoring the YouTube app, and now I'm on freetube on desktop. No need for Google account anymore to look at the feed I want.
Invidious has been a saviour for me on mobile. The ads were so painfully long. To make it worse, I’d use YouTube to help fall asleep, adjust it to the right volume, then BAM! Loud advert. I didn’t use an ad blocker on PC for ages because I get that bandwidth is expensive as hell, but they really started taking the piss and I gave up.
freetube uses Electron = Chromium ;D
At the moment, I am in a hybrid state. I also use Indivious to watch the videos, but I still use the subscription view of YouTube to see what video is new. I have 145 subscriptions. I installed a new addon Redirector, which you can guess what it does, and it redirects each new tab to an Indivious instance if it's a YouTube video page. So YouTube thinks I stopped watching videos at the moment. Sometimes I forget to middle click instead and get reminded how bad the ads are.
The reason I am doing that is, because I feared Google could delete my account, if I keep blocking ads with uBlock Origin. It probably never happened to anyone, but the uncertainty was too high to risk for me, as I need this account for other things. Also sometimes I want to like or comment on the video too.
On the off chance you aren't aware, you can export your YT subs and import them into Invidious via a json file.
I still occasionally visit the actual YouTube frontpahe for the algorithm's suggestions, but all my subscriptions live on Piped, FreeTube, and on my phone, LibreTube.
I actually wasn't aware of this possibility. Thanks. That's probably what I will do soon and stop visiting YouTube altogether.
You can plop a youtube channel URL into an RSS reader and it's a valid RSS. You don't need a Google account in that case, but of course Google could just stop supporting RSS at any point.
That's interesting! I use RSS (and love it) and never tried this on YouTube. You know what, this is actually amazing! Right now I am visiting some channels which I do not want to miss content on and add as RSS News. Thank you for this!