Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
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I watch more YouTube than I do television these days.
As of now, I'm able to watch it ad free on both Brave and Firefox. I don't have revanced as I'm more or less too technically stupid to do it.
If it becomes impossible to watch YouTube, I'll walk away from it just like I did cable in 2009 and Netflix in 2023.
I haven't sailed the high seas since the eighties, and I'd honestly prefer not to, but you gotta make a product that doesn't consistently try to piss me off.
It's not trying to piss you off, it's trying to make money, as it should. Do you have any idea how much money it costs to run the infrastructure behind YouTube? Neither do I, because it's unfathomable.
I pay for YouTube Premium along with 5 friends. It's $5 per month per person. Beats any streaming service by miles.
I do, however pirate all my movies (except for the occasional cinema visit) and TV shows.
If you are using LibreTube this is fixable by disabling piped proxies in the setting. HOWEVER do be warned that Youtube will know your IP, so you should only really do this while using a VPN service.
Got a question, I just found out about LibreTube from this post. I use NewPipe on phone and FreeTube on laptop, but LibreTube's UI looks really good so want to give it a try. Is "YouTube will know your IP" a concern in terms of privacy or because of something else related to them know your IP is using apps that remove ads?
I've never been worried about YouTube knowing I use another app to access their stuff, so just curious if this is "just" about Google knowing you IP or something more.
I know this is the privacy community and don't want to downplay the "Google knowing your IP" part but curious about this and being so explicit on the app setting as well when you turn it on
It is, yes. The issue being they might ban your ip address, which is the first reason why the instances are not playing videos specifically, and then you can not access Youtube servers from the IP you called the servers from. For example, if you use it this way from home without a vpn or orbot, you will likely not be able to access the Youtube servers after a ban from any device that is running over your router directly to the Youtube servers and not over a VPN. I do not know why they do this though, might just be the sheer amount of requests. Not sure, though just don't. Use protection. An Internet condom. Orbot is free and so is the free version of Proton VPN. Do not use random free VPNs though. If the VPN gets banned you slip on another condom.
Does this also include using ReVanced? Because as I understand it it uses the official app.
Not to be a downer but... how did people not anticipate this happening? Google is likely going to do everything they can to shut down non-official clients like Piped, since they're sidestepping all of YouTube's revenue streams. Hopefully they don't take the nuclear option and somehow lock down the API and make it much harder to download videos via tools like yt-dlp.
I'm not going to be popular saying this but how is the service supposed to survive without a revenue stream? It takes a shit ton of bandwidth and storage to keep YouTube running, that ain't free.
I get that the ads are incredibly annoying but if you truly watch as much YouTube as some people in this thread are claiming, maybe it's worth paying for it? I bit the bullet and for basically the price of my cancelled Spotify subscription I now have no ads in YT and an okay streaming service with yt music.
Of course Google could do things better. And actually I think it would be important to have a competitor. But I wouldn't expect that one to be free either.
This is c/privacy. Are you really advocating for pouring money on the company (Google) that's doing everything it can to get to know everyone and use the information for showing deceiving ads, among other things? Or the company that supports false political propaganda? (In the form of paid advertisements). Support your creators, thats a very good thing, but for the love of god please do not fund this data mining machine.
I really am! If they don't get money, and they don't get data, and they (obviously) don't get donations, how are they supposed to run the service? Out of the goodness of their hearts?
You could try Clipious from FDroid. It's my fallback for ReVanced.
I even completely switched from ReVanced to Clipious + private Invidious instance, it's snappy and flawless.
You can even redirect any Youtube link to an Invidious instance automatically with libRedirect, living the dream.