Invidious - Access YouTube videos without ads and tracking.

• #alternatives

Invidious¹ is an open source alternative front-end for YouTube. It allows you to access YouTube content without privacy-invading tracking and annoying ads. Creating an account is also possible to subscribe to channels and create playlists - these are Invidious accounts, a Google account is not required. Another nice detail is the RSS link on channel pages which makes it easy to copy and paste feeds into your RSS reader to get notified about new videos.

There are several public servers/instances² available, just pick one from the official list linked below (I personally recommend to stick to those that does not use Cloudflare). Depending on the server performance/workload there might occasionally be errors - if that happens to you just switch to a different instance. There is a handy “Switch Invidious Instance” link for that in the sidebar.

The URL structure is simple: just replace “youtube.com” with the URL of your chosen instance. For example

https://youtube.com/watch?v=SomeVideoId

becomes

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=SomeVideoId

Alternatively, you can host your own private or public instance.

While I’d love to see more people moving to the Fediverse there still is a lot of good content on YouTube. Invidious is a great way to access said content without being tracked.