Hello guys, I have noticed that all the big internet services are starting to get worse and worse. And I am forced to migrate to foss alternatives. I have moved from Windows to OpenSUSE, from Reddit to Lemmy, etc. But I have an issue with moving from youtube. It is not that my favourite channels are not bringing me alternative they do but it is somewhat fragmented. Some of them are on PeerTube, some on Floatplane, and some on Nebula and I would rather pay those than youtube. My issue is that each of these has its app and I would like to have them united in one app to which I link all my accounts to. Does something like this exist?
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You can’t really make your favorite content creators switch to other platforms, so the best thing you can do for now is use a privacy-preseving frontend for YT. I can highly recommend Piped for PC and LibreTube for Android. They allow you to watch all YT videos and manage your subs/playlists without having a YT account or using the YT site or app. You can even self-host a Piped server if you want to.
Edit: So the major difference between Piped+LibreTube and NewPipe is that Piped is a website that handles the YT scraping and sub/playlist management for you, and the LibreTube app just connects to it like the YT app connects to the YT website. This means you can access it from your browser, synchronize your subs/playlists between devices and also hide your IP from Google servers. NewPipe accesses YT directly from your phone, so it has to do all that by itself and on every device separately.
Basically:
- YouTube app or browser => YouTube website (has user data)
- NewPipe app (has user data) => YouTube website
- LibreTube app or browser => Piped website (has user data) => YouTube website
It’s hard, I’ve been trying to use peertube, but it’s still kinda lacking. Most creators are still sticking with YT
On the other hand, I download youtube videos I want to watch using yt-dlp. That’s been working well for me for the past 5 years or so.
Can you eli5 yt-dlp? I’ve seen it around but I’m not sure how to use it. Sounds like something worth putting on kodi?
it’s a library / command line software to download youtube videos.
There’s more information here
Basically install the tool, and run
yt-dlp [put your youtube links here without the bracket]to download the video. I haven’t directly used the official command line for years though, so you might want to read the documentations.And that’s because, I wrote my own terminal-ui using their python API, for personal usage and requirements (you need to know at least some python or knowledge using the terminal to use it)
I highly recommend SmartTube for Android TV, YouTube with no ads and SponsorBlock.
Best advice right now is to install F-droid (package manager) on your phone and then Newpipe. Newpipe can import all your subs from YouTube.
Then you just use newpipe and don’t have to use other services. Nothing is as good as YouTube today, and since it costs so much money to own a video service, only big tech corps can afford it.
Peertube is a good alternative but its just not polished enough and the content is questionable. Video is harder than a reddit replacement.
