NewPipe (FOSS available on F-Droid) is nice alternative to ads-infested YouTube. I disabled YouTube and YouTube Music apps on my mobile, and I use NewPipe instead. You can even download YT videos or audio from YT videos using it.

So entitled. How do you expect Google to pay it's content creators that you watch if they didn't have ads?

The issue is obviously one of trade-off.

Google pays content creators so little they have all started including ads in their videos. Si technically as long as you are counted they get paid. Meanwhile, Google is more and more aggressive with their own ads interrupting videos and pushing you to subscribe to their expensive offer.

Some people, like me, have just stopped watching YouTube. Other are turning to blocking ads.

It's the usual tug of war between revenues and UX but I don't think consumers have to feel bad about not playing by Google's rules.

>Some people, like me, have just stopped watching YouTube. Other are turning to blocking ads.

Just use viable FOSS alternatives like NewPipe or PipePipe. They are good and clean. They allow to watch or download YT content, without ads.

When Google's ads do all the following, I'll consider guilt:

a) Don't throw malware in their ads.

b) Don't throw seizure-inducing flashes in their ads.

c) Allow turning off gambling in their ads.

I will be downvoted, but I'm not fooling myself. I don't care. As long as uBlock and yt-dlp still work, I'll use them. If Google breaks them, I'll resort to some automated screengrabbing + maybe some AI automation to click "skip" in a virtual machine or something.

People will use all sorts of excuses, like the ads are about gambling, or contain viruses, or are detrimental to mental health, or whatever. No, don't use these excuses. You just don't want ads, and it is still possible to not see them. That's respectable.

I will up vote you since you make no pretense about it.

I'm not sure how those are "excuses". They are reasons to not want ads. Ads are fundamentally malicious, so you should remove them from your life. I don't view attempting to "influence" me as a valid way to make a living, and am unconcerned with those who want to do it in the same way that I'm unconcerned about what would happen if someone tried to scam people with early wins in a shell game, but people just took the early win and walked instead of placing a big bet. That's just comeuppance.

They are the ecosystem shapers, let them figure it out.

You’re implying that YouTube being limiteZ to creators that don’t care about getting paid would be a bad thing.

I'm using Pipepipe. I believe it's a fork from NewPipe, and has more features, namely skipping sponsor block, and intros

Pipepipe stopped downloading audio or video when I was using it a couple of years back.

I switched over to NewPipe as it was better maintained and worked well.

Since past few months, NewPipe is not automatically showing latest YT videos, but it opens the video if I type in the video's source url. Downloads are working fine though, which is what I mainly use it for.

Will try Pipepipe again next weekend if it fares better.

Google is trying to suppress all these FOSS alternatives to its ads-overloaded apps.

I'm using Grayjay at the moment. Somehow still available in the play store (though with reduced feature set).

What's going on with NewPipe? Their F-droid repository is down. Their domain is down. Their github repository is up, but it links to their domain, which isn't. Are they dying?

Seems like a DNSSEC screw-up. You can find more details here.

https://github.com/TeamNewPipe/website/issues/420#issuecomme...

If google push too hard, someone will make a "youtube mirror" - ie. a complete copy of youtube at a different domain.

The actual data could be hosted p2p across all the users devices, and any missing data retrieved one-time-only from real youtube servers.

Do you have an estimate of how much would be needed to mirror?

BTW PeerTube is a thing.

1GB per video

Has there ever actually been a success story for using end user mobile handsets as servers?

I guess you never received a copyright infringement notice from your ISP for seeding a torrent.

That website will have an IP address and a registered owner. Taking down piracy websites is routine for governments, server providers, and domain registrars now, and they don't care whether the site is actually illegal. You can only get away with this long-term if the site is hosted in Russia, but Russia is sanctioned so how will you pay them?

Eh, somehow The Pirate Bay, Fitgirl Repacks, Anna's Archive, Sci-Hub etc seem to manage it.

The real challenge is delivering good enough performance that your site is better than waiting through 30 seconds of ads; and making it worth your time to run the site: there's hassle, legal risk, and it's not like you can run ads to make some cash.

They're all severely bandwidth limited. Wouldn't work for YouTube. TPB and FGR get around this using torrents.

> The actual data could be hosted p2p across all the users devices

Sounds like a Pied Piper app.