[nisa]

What is the appeal from these YouTube frontends? I came to really dislike them because links are broken after a while because these sites don't live very long and the video data itself is still streamed by YouTube? I don't get it.

[pndy]

Beside the things the other user listed: these sorta give you a way to experience Youtube before it become Google's plaything.

In case of piped and freetube you can subscribe to channels without Google account (freetube does that even offline), it's also possible to import channel subscriptions from Youtube.

There were instances that shortly existed, or which tried to redirect you to some suspicious sites but these were filtered out.

[lrvick]

The appeal is privacy, no ads, and avoiding the need for a Google account or supporting Google with any data to mine.

Some of us feel supporting Google in any way is unethical, but still want to consume some of the content they have lured people to put on their servers.

[WheatMillington]

Do you feel bad about the content creators missing out on the revenue you're denying them?

[lrvick]

Not at all. Giving value to adtech companies only re-enforces content creators being trapped in a bad deal.

If everyone blocked ads content creators would be forced to research platforms that allow direct payment via micro-transactions, merch, or direct donations instead of ads. LBRY and liberapay exist.

If creators want me to tip them, they need to offer me an ethical to do so with money. I will not pay adtech companies with my time, or money, ever.

[hedora]

I think it’s a less of two evils thing.

Also, most of what I watch on YouTube is clearly pirated (or ad free). That’s pretty much been their business model since day one, though they have diversified a little into legitimate for-profit content that is supported by ads.

[MallocVoidstar]

I run a Piped instance on a VPS for myself. It's not linked to my Google account or my home IP (from Alphabet's perspective) in any way. I like giving Alphabet less info about my behavior.

[pantulis]

But then... aren't you missing recommendations and suggested videos? Honest question, I'd say Youtube is half as useful without that.

[toast0]

Youtube without recommendations and suggested videos is a whole lot easier to get in and get out, without getting hooked into watching one more thing.

[dredmorbius]

YouTube will make recommendations based on your immediate session's viewing history, even without an account.

A tremendous advantage to viewing without authenticating is that you can quickly set a strong affinity based on your current interests, and don't have to live with consequences of viewing low-quality content for hours, days, months, years, millennia, etc.

If Invidious and Piped offer(ed) the option to permabam channels as well (to those subscribing directly to those services, or even within a single session), so much the better.

[TheBozzCL]

It does provide basic recommendations based on the video you’re currently watching.

If you only care about the channels you’re subscribed to, it’s a much better experience.

[smazga]

I hope you don't mind me asking for info, but how beefy is the vps? I can't find minimum specs for these frontends, and that would help me know if I have enough spare power at home. I imagine you want all the bandwidth you can get, but are there cpu limitations?

[MallocVoidstar]

Everything put together appears to be using 368 + 94 + 16 + 37 = 515MB of RAM while watching a video. I imagine you'd want some overhead (the backend is mostly Java) and this doesn't include the reverse proxy. Seems to use fairly low amounts of CPU. (My VPS is 5 Epyc cores and 9GB of RAM, so way beyond what it needs for this.)

[t0astbread]

Doesn't that still leave YouTube with one unique IP address that all your traffic is originating from? It would in any case close off some tracking vectors if you also use other Google products from your home IP address but I guess you would also need a proxy/VPN or share the instance to get any kind of anonymity.

[boomboomsubban]

The lighter ui is fairly significant. I go a step further and do most of my YouTube watching in mpv, but occasionally I'll find my browser unresponsive and find the problem fixed by exiting some YouTube tab.

[Springtime]

The settings for volume, speed, quality, whether to show/hide recommendations, disable autoplay, etc can be controlled and without requiring any login. Also less cruft. On YT proper such things were only possible with userscripts/addons which ime by the time I found Invidious (2020) had already been broken by YT changes so it was an easy switch when used with a browser addon that auto redirects.

Videos can also be optionally proxied in some instances but that wasn't a draw for me.

[bionade24]

> the video data itself is still streamed by YouTube?

It's up to the instance admin for Invidious and the behaviour of Piped to proxy googlevideo. Not sure if it's visible at Invidious if you use an instance that doesn't proxy the traffic, but you can be sure it's proxied when you use Piped.

[SushiHippie]

The links don't really break, as the links are basically s/youtube.com/invidious_domain/

[dagw]

I don't know about this site in particular, but one very nice feature that some YouTube frontends have is a download button next to each video.