Alternative to youtube: freetube

Offtopic
1

Now, as you may know by now youtube is blocking adblockers and forcing you to sit through twin 30-second unskippable ads most times you want to watch a video.

Now, to install freetube, you can install it from discover/gnome software for gui method or you could type this in your terminal: flatpak install flathub io.freetubeapp.FreeTube .

Or if you want deb, download it through here: FreeTube - The Private YouTube Client

Glad to help!

Then you are finally free of the tyrannical rule of the evil corporation and their ad partners()

2

And not watching videos on Youtube is not enough to be free?

Did you check the terms of service of Youtube?

And by the way: Freetube is not an alternative to Youtube. Your title is misleading.

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3

Youtube’s policy is bogus. Sitting through ads, especially ones with nude women is not fun(unless you like porn, that is). Worse, they are appearing more frequently!

4

Youtube with nude women isn’t fun hmm sounds interesting imo.
Please post a link to the Youtube you use as I haven’t seen that one.

5

I use the same youtube.

Some people get spam adverts or scam adverts which can hack a computer if clicked.

6

If you want to access YouTube without the ads (other than those in the videos themselves) and without Google tracking the videos you watch, you can learn about “Invidious”. There are numerous instances, some of which are quite stable.

This is my preferred instance:

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7

I may see a youtube warning that adblockers are not allowed on youtube (about 1 in 5 videos), but there is often an X on that popup and it closes and allows watching the video anyway (I’m mostly using my Lubuntu system using the chromium snap package; but I get the same response from Debian)

On occasion the X doesn’t appear on the youtube-adblocker-popup (I just started four youtube vids, three were without any adblock issue popups; one had a youtube blocker WITHOUT X; where just hit ^R to refresh page and the video started without the warning this time).

Maybe there are regional issues at play, but youtube thus far has only put up an (rare but annoying) pop-up for me.

ps: I’m currently more interested in why it sometimes has a X on the popup, other times does not. But the popup appearing is somewhat inconsistent anyway. I get the same for chromium and firefox (default packages for both Ubuntu thus snap, and Debian thus deb)

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8

Yup. Well, it may not be geographic. Google/YouTube are doing A/B testing and some users are experiencing anti-adblocking measures. I’m not sure if it’s geographic groups or some other criteria, but not everyone is a part of this experiment. Some folks don’t get the X option. It simply stops letting you play any videos.

Some information is in this thread on the Linux.org forum:

https://www.linux.org/threads/ladies-and-gentlemen-ublock-origin-has-been-defeated.46828/

Not everyone is impacted at this point. If you use uBlock Origin and you get blocked, you can (usually) just update your filters and then continue your ad-free experience. I don’t use any other adblocking measures, so I can’t speculate on solutions for those who do. They’re changing the code regularly, so you may need to update your filters more than once per day. It’s a quick and painless process.

https://i.imgur.com/wDPVQHD.png

You first need to do a purge and then you can update the filters (with uBlock Origin).

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