Think about performance improvement since the frontend does not load things which gets deleted by an addon, so it's lighter on resources.
Talking about privacy, using a frontend prevents Google from getting your IP.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2024
42 points (93.8% liked)
Privacy
31945 readers
601 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
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.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
That’s not entirely correct, invidious doesn’t act as a proxy. From the invidious faq:
By default, the video stream is fetched directly from Google's servers (
googlevideo.com) in order to reduce the bandwidth required by invidious, meaning that Google will be able to see your IP address and some other data commonly sent by web browsers, like your user-agent string.
That's invidious, piped actually act as a proxy (which is what I use).
Thanks for pointing out.
Reddit's performance is actually unusable on mobile unless you use infinity
This is even more true if you subscribe to channels using rss feeds from invidious, then simply use yt-dlp to grab the video directly from the URL. You also can use the noscript extension to selectively block the google video script and instead use yt-dlp to download the video. Using this over a no logging VPN like Mullvad prevents google from tracking your IP. Finally yt-dlp not only allows for use with invidious, but has a sponsorblock flag, which will cut out the mentions of sponsors in the video and then paste it back together, essentially autoskipping the sponsor mentions.
On Android, you can download an app from FDroid called Seal that basically uses yt-dlp, and can be customized to use the same flags.
Also they limit the amount of data your device sends to Google when using YouTube.
- Adblockers aren't perfect, and unless you're running an ultra-paranoid uMatrix setup, you're likely running some scripts you don't want to.
- Cookies, even """necessary""" first party ones, can be used for tracking.
- Unless you use reddit's old. subdomain (which they might kill at any moment), reddit's and youtube's webclients are bloated beyond belief.
- Browsers have far more ways to fingerprint you than some api calls or webscraping over tcp on a 3rd party client; especially with javascript enabled.
- Webclients are often ugly and painful to use.
- You can completely avoid the algorithm.
- Due to the relative obscurity, you can avoid the arms race between projects like uBlock and social media platforms. youtube-dl got some legal flak, but yt-dlp is continuing its legacy.