I’m not sure it’s the “best” way, but it’s a solid alternative, and receives rapid updates when YouTube moves to break things.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/15571129
I’m using this all the time myself. There is no login to YouTube required and it supports adding subscriptions and doing everything important you can do on YouTube.
And the best part is no ads whatsoever.
Out of curiosity, what’s is better about it than YouTube?
Vanilla YouTube is obvious, but I’ve got ublock origin , sponsor block and that thing that renames stuff to non click bait.
It all just works and I don’t get adds and I keep all my sub’s and still get useful suggestions.
On android i just use revanced.
So, what’s the pull of downloading a 3rd party for Linux / PC?
For me it’s not just about ads, it’s also about surveillance. With FreeTube you can have subscriptions without needing a linked YouTube account, and all the subscription/watch history data is stored locally. So, it’s a good opt-out of Google/YouTube surveillance. And you can import/export subscriptions if you need to transfer to another device. I happen to use FreeTube for this because it is frequently updated and I like the setup, but other options exist - I’m not really promoting this option over other options, just raising some awareness about it.
Isn’t this exactly like the original YouTube?
They get users to provide free content with the impression it is a genuine grassrots community then when the site becomes popular enough they cash in. imdb was like this too.
Did you mean to reply to a comment?
Freetube is a frontend client that uses YouTube.
Sorry, I didn’t read the article. Thanks for picking me up on it.
I just use my Brave browser which avoids ads and doesn’t require login but I see now that FreeTube offers a few customisation features and allows you to import your subscriptions.
And there are privacy benefits too. With Freetube your watch history is stored only on your computer, not YouTube’s servers
Really? I imagine it is free because FreeTube collect data on you.
