You might have noticed that even on Firefox (depending on your lists) YouTube may detect uBlock Origin on Firefox now
There’s already a workaround (found, again, here), but I figured I would use this opportunity to tell people that projects like Piped and Invidious exist, which both allow you to watch YouTube without loading their ads, with improved Privacy and (in the case of Piped) even Geoblocking-Circumvention and SponsorBlock out of the box.
They’re both great tools, and using something like LibRedirect you can even automatically go to Piped or Invidious when clicking/opening a YouTube link (and more).
Both don’t load ads, but unless changed in the settings Individous may still make connections to Google/YouTube to load the video(s) themselves.
Bit of a shameless plug for these projects, but I figured this is a really good time to show these projects as I often see people asking what they are in threads on here
I’d like to add to the sentiment of this post by saying that if you ever used any of those amazing websites, I’m sure the developers will highly appreciate it if those with the means could consider contributing to their projects.
We all know how greedy and shameless YouTube can be, and yet those developers give us incredible products for free. And if you ever saw the entitled requests of some users on their projects’ pages whenever YouTube implements some changes, and they have to rush to fix their code, I’m sure you would appreciate them even more. I’ve personally seen quite a few projects being abandoned because of the sometimes thankless job of being a developer, and I would hate it for any of these to suffer a similar fate.
So if you can and are willing, feel free to join me in contributing to:
I was about to say add uBlock Origin to that list but apparently they don’t accept donations per the bottom of their homepage.
I will not accept donations or sponsorships of any kind.
That’s some fuck you energy right there.
Lmao serious ‘fuck you’ energy.
Out of curiosity I went to the project’s page and saw more info on why they don’t take donations:
Free. Open-source. For users by users. No donations sought. If you ever want to contribute something, think about the people working hard to maintain the filter lists you are using, which are available to use by all for free.
Its crazy all my piped servers stopped working which sucks, if anyone is willing to share a server that works or a self hosted one they could let me in. Hit me up
Late reply, but piped.adminforge.de is my server of choice, with piped.smnz.de and piped.lunar.icu as alternatives
The irony of these smalltime maintainers asking for donations when their own software is purpose made to hurt the income of smalltime creators. Particularly if they include Sponsorblock.
In my opinion anything that is just a frontend for Youtube is just a bandaid, and if they get to much attention Google will make using them increasingly untenable.
The real answer is moving to competing platforms outside of Googles control.
That’s not possible though. There simply is no content on other platforms and they generally aren’t as good as YouTube and probably never will be.
The only platform I could see to rival YouTube in the future is Twitch
Lemmy users are just delusional in that regard. You can’t just switch away from Google, its not the tech that makes in great, its the content. It’s the same with messengers, if your friends arent there how useful is that foss messenger really?
Thankfully the only creator I regularly watch that does non-educational videos uploads them on their own website. For everything else nebula actually is an alternative, although I’m not subscribed to it at the moment
Maybe it’s unlikely for this to happen, but I wonder if it’d be possible for yt to go down like reddit did. Yt makes a series of bad decisions, so a lot of people move from there to similar platforms. The other services don’t have much content right now, but from what I here, neither did Lemmy before the “exodus.”
I get that reddit and youtube are very different types of platforms and that the whole reddit thing happened because of pretty specific circumstances, but idk, maybe something vaguely similar could happen.
It’s the same with messengers, if your friends arent there how useful is that foss messenger really?
This is so difficult. How many people would be willing to switch to Signal or Wickr for one friend? And then what if none of their friends don’t want to switch? And then the friends of those people, etc. Trying to switch workgroups, family, friends and all of their friends as well is a lost cause, it would never happen.
The alternative exists, but it costs money. Most big YouTuber accounts (at least the ones I’m subscribed to) post on either Nebula, Patreon or some platform like that. It would cost quite a lot to subscribe to them all, but still less than YouTube premium in my country. So in the worst case scenario where YouTube really blocks all ad free interfaces except paid use, that’s my answer. I don’t like it as I think a lot of the content is overpriced for what it is, but it’s better than having $$$ swallowed up by some mega corporation that is just interested in screwing authors and viewers over as much as possible.
YouTube is insanely large in size and scope but…
The key is just a platform that actually pays creators.
Nebula is one I expect to succeed for its niche.
Something like Floatplane with direct subscriptions is an option too.
Yeah haven’t thought of that, but they aren’t really YouTube alternatives. You don’t use them instead of YouTube, but as an addition.
Nebula has about 10.000 videos, from only select creators. Youtube has around 1 billion videos, and everyone can upload. Nebula is not actually a Youtube alternative unless you’re in one of two specific target audiences:
- Already established educational content creator looking for alternative platform
- Person watching educational video content and not much else
I don’t see Nebula opening up their site to everyone and letting anyone upload content any time soon, and for that reason I don’t see them as a Youtube competitor at all. They’ve found their niche with curated quality over quantity.
Fun fact: The difference between 10.000 and 1 billion is… around 1 billion.
I am using Ublock and sponsor block,so far no adverts but it is always good to have more tools,just in case.Thank you for the links :)
Unless people mass-migrate away from Chrome-based browsers (basically everything expect Firefox) Google will at one point enable their Web Environment Integrity thing, force all other browsers to enable it too because otherwise a lot of websites will stop working in them, and no alternative frontend will have access to the video streams anymore.
Web environment integrity is a non-starter because it offers avenues for bad actors to enforce “integrity” that forces malware to be loaded as well as legitimate page elements. However, that doesn’t mean Google won’t keep trying to stop ad blockers, alternative interfaces etc in the future.
Perhaps, but eventually there will probably ba a certificate authority alternative to Google. But I agree, we need regulation to determine to ensure that programs calling themselves web browsers will have to adhere to standards, and not be based on features that make certain websites work only on their browser. I think the backlash reaction to implementing “integrity” as a standard was really healthy. But there is still a lot of action to take on the regulatory front.
eventually there will probably ba a certificate authority alternative to Google
Which won’t matter (for access from third-party apps), because to be accepted by websites they need to prove their trustworthiness, so you can’t just use a different one to circumvent it.
It can be very similar to the TLS scheme we use today, where certificates are signed by regulated CA’s. The only difference is that currently there is no regulation to ensure that Google will build chrimium to trust other authorities for browser integrity other than itself. That is definitely a major concern. Fortunately, I don’t think that it is long term viable. First, Microsoft, Mozilla and Apple would be extremely unhappy with this scheme. That’s right off the bat. So there will definitely be resistance on that front because eventually it would do something like break youtube compatibility with Firefox.
Now, I do think that it is plausible that these organizations could come to a agreement that is still ultimately bad for web browsers. There fore, this should be considered by government regulators as something to pay attention to. I’m not too pessimistic about them doing this. There us political will to preserve the open internet, especially in the EU. It looks like the US is also set to re-adopt net neutrality rules. So, im just not as pessimistic about it.
The only issue is that in the short-term, alot of these services that are free are going to degrade. This is what we are seeing with youtube. That is too bad, but I am hopeful and optimistic that it will lead to a more open internet. The fact that we are having this conversation on a decentralized social network is a positive sign.
How long until Google says “fuck it” and outright starts banning adblock users? Considering how deep a lot of people are into the Google ecosystem, this is potentially devastating. Imagine losing access to you email, photos, etc., with no way to appeal. Good luck if you want to actually speak to anyone human at Google.
I’m already in the process of decoupling from gmail for this exact reason.
I’ve decoupled the most important things, but there’s just so much stuff that is still using my gmail.
It took me a couple of years to migrate away from Gmail but it was completely worth it. People lose their Google accounts for any and no reason at all. People don’t realise how many important accounts would be lost without access to their email. Now, with my own domain, I can move hosts at any moment.
Losing access to your banks. Banks in England send you an email link to confirm your access.
in case of a bank Im sure you can just walk to a physical office and get your account linked to another email
things will get hard with things like steam
I don’t think they’d ever ban users, but this game of cat and mouse will continue forever. They’ll make the service worse and worse, while alternatives like Rumble and Odysee will get more and more users.
That said, back up all your Google data, and migrate to your own email domain. Millions of people all over the world lose access to their Google accounts each year for any and no reason at all. All it takes is a capricious algorithm. They don’t have any customer support at all.
unlikely especially if they’re paying for other services. they’ll most likely prevent playback
