Freetube is the best way to watch YouTube

Unruffled [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.commod to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 230 points –
popsci.com

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.

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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.

I imagine it is free because FreeTube collect data on you.

It doesn't have to sell user data if it doesn't have to make money if it is run by volunteers.

You can disable watch history in your Google/YouTube account as well. It's not like you're forced to have it on native YouTube either.

Wikipedia, Whirlpool, GiHub are the only big sites I can think of which resisted going commercial. They may still be selling user data though.

Can you think of others?

I don’t know whirlpool but you might want to read up on what your code on GitHub is being used for.

I don't get your argument. FreeTube is nowhere near as big as Wikipedia or GitHub. Are you not using any free software?

LibreOffice, Gimp, System Informer, Nushell, Thunderbird, Firefox, Steam, this Lemmy instance, Matrix, … I don't know what to tell you. I can go through all the applications and websites I use and I'll have a hard time finding some that sell my user data.