Oh hell yeah we're gonna have a GOOD couple weeks of using Freetube before YouTube inevitably changes something else and breaks Freetube again.
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2026
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Privacy
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FreeTube supports external players, if you use it as a tool to find videos instead of watching them, it works fairly reliably, such breakage of feed grabbing hasn't happened in years. Then you just grab the videos with MPV via yt-dlp, not only MPV is a much better player than practically anything else, but yt-dlp contributors are much faster at figuring out problems and implementing fixes.
This latest problem wasn't with playing videos on FT, it was with finding and fetching the feed/list of videos for your subscribed channels. IOW if you directly pasted in the url for a video it would play just fine, you just couldn't fetch the list of available videos directly from FT.
Yea, thank you, that's exactly what I meant with
breakage of feed grabbing
If you stay hooked to big corporate-owned services, you agree to get enshittified. With Freetube, at least I get to choose the type enshittification I'm exposed to, and get to deal a bit of damage to Google's profits in the process. I'll gladly take that.
Here is an extension you might be interested in if you want to be mischievous.
Thanks, I appreciate any pointers to new tech. I've actually come across AdNauseam in the past, and it baffled me because it seemed to solve little to none of the problems with ads. It...
- still uses up my bandwidth because it loads all ads.
- still exposes me to malvertising campaigns (the ads aren't sandboxed, after all, but all ad-related scripting is executed on my machine).
- will still provide anyone rolling out ads with revenue (because ad clicked = money for them)
- may still be used to profile me - after all, no idiot clicks on all the ads, which makes AdNauseam users stick out like a sore thumb.
The way I see it, blocking ads is the only way to obscure (not obfuscate) your true interests, improve security and starve any advertiser of revenue, thus disincentivising advertising by attacking its economic foundation.
I'm happy to be corrected on any of the above points; I just can't see what advantages AdNauseam is supposed to have over conventional adblocking.
Usually people who buy ads pay for clicks on those ads.
So, the idea is to register a click on the ad, which makes the business pay the ad agency it's commission, but not actually visit or look at their website, which is the whole point of buying an ad.
If businesses see that paying ad agencies brings little to no actual customers, they stop buying ads. ~~One can only hope.~~
They also have a paper addressing many of your concerns.
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1873/IWPE17_paper_23.pdf
That said, I don't use it myself, mostly because of bandwidth and processing cost reasons. I also don't care about it that much. Ads suck, but I barely see any of them due to my browsing habits.
What would you say is the biggest difference between using an adblocker and using FreeTube?
It's better to silo things that require you to install an extension on browsers into a different app. Extensions alter browser fingerprints. So this let's you sponsorblock and AdBlock YouTube without worrying about fingerprints on all other sites
Also has a nice way to handle subscriptions without login
I mean, you really should be using an ad-blocker on the rest of the web too.
yes, but ideally via something built into the browser, not an extension
ublock is ubiquitous enough that it should be fine (comes pre-installed on Librewolf, Mullvad Browser, Ironfox, etc)
The issue with it is how it operates in userspace and how any settings alterations makes the print unique
doesn't the entire browser run in userspace? Also settings alterations make any print unique, even built-in adblockers
Yep, this.
Adding to this, I want to follow channels and subscribe to creators, without making an account registered on youtube. I already have sponsor block and you block and a bunch of other enhancements for youtube, but it's hard for me to curate the content that comes my way without having an account signed in.
So I just renamed FreeTube app to YouTube on my desktop machines, and slap the YouTube logo on it, and now it's logically partitioned from everything else.
I actually do the same thing with a handful of other sites that I traffic frequently, instead of just making a profile for them or a sandboxed container for them. Facebook and Reddit both get summoned either from the start menu or from Mac OS spotlight and at least in theory those browsers that have been renamed and re-icon'd won't be able to interact with any of my other browsers in any way.
Next step is to learn how to block those domains from my other browsers, and the block all of the domains from those specific rebadged browsers.
But for now, FreeTube is hands down the best game in town if I want to watch, say, the five most recent episodes from Hank Green or Level1 Techs, in a row.