I’ve Invidious hosted on my Little Raspberry Pi 4, and using it’s WPA app on every device I got.

Zero ad + Decent UI + Access to highest video quality

https://invidious.io/

That content does not belong to YouTube. And they also do not pay for 99% of it.

YouTube depends on people to use it for it's existence. They also depend on those users to upload content so that YouTube can then treat that content as if it is its own and monetize it.

If I was in such a precarious position I wouldn't go about making the experience crappy for those users that I'm desperately dependent upon.

Some of the youtube channels I watch also have channels on Peertube instances or on Odysee. Both options allow me to follow using RSS. I prefer my views to go to these platforms, so hopefully more content creators see these as viable hosts for their videos.

Peertube is also federated, so you can follow channels from your Mastodon account (and I think Lemmy too). You could also spin up your own instance if you like too.

Well, I really hope that doesn’t affect Vinegar

( Safari extension that replaces YouTube’s horrible video player with the system’s default.

It’s great, it also allows you to force Best Quality, very useful on platforms where YouTube defaults to 480p for no reason like iPadOS )

Imagine buying premium to watch videos riddled with ads and sponsors in the video itself.

This format just isn't making any sense for me, they would've implemented something as sponsorblock years ago

I can't wait for that platform to implode.

If they say like that, it means that's now is allowed to make a third party youtube client with login support?

I'd immediately install an officially sanctioned third party youtube app without shorts and without the algorithmic feed, if all i would need to do is let the phone play ads when i'm doing something else

They can try, but it is unlikley to work for long. So my general reaction is:

Never!