this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2025
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What alt front ends are there? How would you bypass the age check? Back in the day I didn't have an account and you could get around it using third party sites but those don't work anymore as far as I know.
Invidious mainly, and that doesn't use any YT accounts, it's the equivalent of watching YT logged out.
Also, Grayjay lets you log in through it but that probably doesn't bypass the age check if you're KYC'd.
If you're an active creator yourself though or even if you only have a few vids you made years ago that are still up, I'd set up PeerTube, Odysee, or both, and post those there while you still can, though.
Presumably once YouTube finishes rolling out age verification, all these age restricted videos will require logging in to view them and anonymous front end appd will be locked out.
Age-gated vids have been login-walled for a while now, non-age-gated stuff is still viewable while logged out and through alt front-ends, for now.
I won't put it past Google to fully login-wall YT at some point in the future though, or even worse, put DRM on it so that it's only watchable through Chrome on Android, or Chrome or Edge on Windows, and non-Android and non-Windows OSes, and non-Chrome/Edge browsers are blocked, as well as alt front-ends and downloaders, and even mirroring to competing platforms.
they could but it would harm a lot of organic growth since they rely on content being easily shared.
i don't think they will do chrome only as that would be anticompetitive
Not unless they're complete boneheads (which, admittedly, is not impossible). If they do that, they effectively lose embed-video-in-external-sites functionality, and that might just be enough for unpaid content creators to dump the platform en masse and cause their effective monopoly to crumble. The content creators who are actually making decent money may never leave entirely, but if another viable platform comes into existence, I bet most of them would mirror to it.
Assuming mirroring isn't borked by that aforementioned DRM.