Mandatory shoutout to Invidious:

https://invidious.io https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

An accessible interface to YouTube content without tracking, using a decentralized network of community-run instances that scrape, rather than API-call, site data.

[EDIT]

Also Yattee doing the Lord's work:

https://github.com/yattee/yattee

Privacy oriented video player for iOS, tvOS and macOS with Invidious support.

Invidious is great. I quit visiting reddit, twitter, instagram, youtube in favor of frontends and libredirect. Has greatly improved my life because I use these platforms less, but also the peace of mind. Invidious seems to be the least reliable of the bunch of frontends, which makes sense because it is the most bandwith.

At some point I will set up a yt-dlp thing to download the videos I want because the public instance invidious experience recently has not been great. I could also try a self-hosted invidious.

Something interesting is considering the privacy benefits of watching the content on a privacy frontend while sitll talking directly to youtube. Does it prevent the fingerprinting? Does it improve your privacy significantly?

I imagine the shared frontend proxy approach is best for privacy, but is not reliable currently.

photon-reddit.com has been a gamechanger for one specific feature—it lets you recover deleted comments and posts. But, I have found it less reliable than redlib.

Have a look at Odysee, it is a decentralized alternative to YouTube, not just a frontend, and some YouTube channels are mirrored there already.

And Morphe (https://morphe.software) on Android.

> that scrape

After hopping between several in the past, I've learned to avoid services that blatantly violate TOS for their existence, since they rarely last long, usually going private once the cease and desist letters start coming.

I ended up just going with the non-music youtube premium "lite" for $8/month.