Does usage of third party youtube apps necessitate a VPN in the near future?

Pete90@feddit.de to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 65 points –

Greetings y'all. I've been using ways to circumvent YouTube ads for years now. I'd much rather donate to creators directly instead of using Google as a middle man, needing YouTube Premium. If even pay for premium for just a add free version, if the price wouldn't be so outrageous. I've So far used adblockers, Vanced and then Revanced.

Since the recent developments in this matter, I've setup Tubearchivist, a self hosted solution to download YouTube videos for later consumption. It mostly works great, with a few minor things that bother me but I highly recommend it. ReVanced also still works, but nobody knows for how long.

The question now is, if I should use a VPN to obscure my identity to Google. I don't know if I'm being paranoid here but I wouldn't put it past Google to block my account, if they see YouTube traffic for my IP address and no served ads. Revanced even uses my main Google account, so not that far fetched.

So far, or at least to my knowledge, Google has never done this but I think they just might in the future. So I'm planning on putting tubearchivist behind a VPN via gluetun.

What do you think? I'm eager to hear your opinions on this.

I can also add my docker compose, if there's interest and when I'm back on my PC.

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Or just use Piped, Invidious or any other frontend https://pluja.github.io/awesome-privacy/#youtube

I don't see any ads in years, just don't use youtube.com. whether on PC, phone, Android TV.

I mostly watch YouTube on iOS, Apple TV, or the web on my work computer. So piped etc is not an option for me, this works well.

You have Yattee, works on iOS/AppleTV https://github.com/yattee/yattee

Yeah I’m not sideloading anything that’s not worth me saving $2 a month.

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