As it stands, both Piped and Invidious are dead.
Because od that, I almost completely stopped watching youtube but l’d still sometimes like to check what the people I follow posted (I used to do that via Piped).
Are there any new ways of following people without actually using Google? I’m aware of the tools that download new videos as they come out but I’m more interested in just “subscribing”, kinda like RSS?
Ideally it would be on iOS
I just use yt-dlp and VLC ¯\(ツ)/¯
i “subscribe” via rss in freshrss, just use the normal youtube.com on desktop and mobile browser. StoptheMadness on iOS to strip ads
https://github.com/alexta69/metube and Plex
Orion browser works fine for me on iOS
Unwatched is great on ios.
This is awesome, thank you!
it’s so pointless
? its pointless to watch videos without it being tracked to an account and with adds removed?
Newpipe still works on Android.
PipePipe has even more sources.
I thought I was the only one.
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Pump these numbers up brotha
I like that pipepipe provides an option to use a Google account fall back for videos that are age verified, since those don’t work anymore without an account.
And they got a content filter update too so can block channels and keywords.
FreeTube still works for my Linux system, for most videos.
I just use Newpipe
However, Piped and Invidious are not dead. YouTube is trying really hard to kill them but they still work somewhat. It is a cat and mouse game.
They’re effectively dead. I haven’t ever found a single instance that works for more than a few days in years, despite people constantly recommending them.
Probably because people self-host them. I have an invidious instance self-hosted and use clipious on android to watch videos on it. Feels super modern and have pretty much no issues. Public instances usually don’t work because of datacenter ips get blocked by YouTube.
On my phone I still use LibreTube but with the option to load the video directly from YouTube (essentially doing what NewPipe is doing) and on PC I just use YouTube’s directly. I still use Piped to keep my subscriptions synchronized tho.
NewPipe or Patched YouTube App using ReVanced Manager
As others have said, invidious is not dead, and they’re working on factoring out the part that interfaces with YouTube itself, so that updates to react to changes in YouTube will be able to be implemented much faster.
yt-dlp --sponsorblock-remove all <url>
is the way. It turns playlist link into nicely named, curated video files awaiting to played by a regular video playerDoes “all” remove every type of segment? Because that seems excessive for most people, there is a lot of filler/etc sections that are over-zealously tagged.
That seems like it would screw the creators more than YouTube.
Possibly, but for how ad laiden YT has become it’s a path I’m willing to take.
Addressing the subscribing part; I had similar requirements, so I started subscribing via FreshRSS while using a custom theme to give it a YouTube-like experience.
I shared the setup a few month ago here: https://lemmy.world/post/21381606
Edit: One of the benefits of using selfhosted RSS with a web interface is that it is platform agnostic.
No worries! This setup ended up working better than I thought, and I’ve been using it as my primary way of interfacing with youtube.
I used NewPipe for a while, now I’m trying out a fork called PipePipe. https://github.com/InfinityLoop1308/PipePipe
Revanced and Firefox + uBlock Origin.
First one’s hard to set up, but I’m sure anybody self-hosting literally anything could do it in two seconds.