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I have a complicated relationship with Youtube like, I imagine, a lot of people.
While I really dislike everything that Google is doing with the platform and
their idiotic algorithm, there are tons of exceptionnaly good content on the
platform.
You can find everything regarding computer science, 3d printing, physics talks,
video games, history and so much more. It's full of dedicated people
talking about their passion. I used to only use the "Subscriptions" page of
Youtube. The default home page has always been irrelevant, and the Popular tab
is just plain cancer.
Everything was good. I was going on Youtube, checking new videos from
people I liked, and that was it.
Then came the change of algorithm, a few years back. New videos from content
creators were not always showing up in my feed. The more the time passed, the
less I was using the Subscriptions page. Instead I found myself using more and
more the default homepage. And in the beginning of that period, it was not that
bad. It showed a lot of new things and I discovered even more awesome content
creators.
But you had to be mindful about what you were watching. You had to censor
yourself because if you start watching something you usually don't watch out of
curiosity, you end up with your home page filled with crap you are not
interested in, and you have to play the algorithm game. Tell it what you like,
and what you don't like, all giving more and more information to Google.
Plus I found myself mindlessly scrolling in order to find new things. They were
slowly winning. And I was slowly loosing.
As more time passed, the addiction became clear. I was not addicted because the
algorithm was only finding gems, no. I was addicted to the fact that while doom
scrolling I could potentially and eventually find something great. I went from
searching for what I wanted to watch to scrolling until Youtube found something.
And that was when I decided that I needed a change.
Enters Invidious. It's a FOSS alternative front end to Youtube. There are
multiple instance deployed, but I decided to run my own. Invidious only uses
Youtube for very specific things, mostly playing a video.
But the rest (ie subscriptions, watch history, etc) are all local. There is no
algorithm. You subscribe, you get a chronologic feed and that's it. You also
have a Popular tab, that shows popular videos (based on views, I believe) but
only from your subscriptions (and the ones of other local users, in case of a
shared instance).
The website is also stupidely simple. No bells and whistles, no mandatory
javascript, no animation, no popups asking you to become a member of whatever
shit program every two days, no ads, no chat.
It's basically feeding on Youtube's video collections, whithout giving them
anything in return, which is something I really enjoy. Screwing up Google for
once.
Obviously, for the creators themselves, that are caught in the system, it's not
optimal, but there are a lot of other alternatives to support them rather than
having to be fed with irrelevant ads every 2 freaking minutes, and that's the
road I'm taking.
So all in all Invidious brought back what was cool in Youtube, putting content
creators at the center, and not advertisers. It makes navigation really fast and
easy, without any UI dark patterns. It works well on mobiles too. As for
administrating it, it's very easy. It's a total win and I thank the Invidious
devs for their awesome work!