moving away from youtube
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22th of January, 2024 | 22.01.2024 | unavailable on medium
![Fire in Philadelphia, Queen. Drawing of a building on fire. There are people and firefighters gathered around in front of it.](../media/philadelphia-fire.jpg)
Current state of YouTube
youtube has been going pretty bad lately. in fact, it's been going pretty to shit lately, if you ask me. i, luckily or unluckily (you decide), have not bee seriously affected by these changes. too many ads? don't worry, firefox and ublock origin will save me. youtube asking me to turn off my adblocker? no worries, ublock origin team has already fixed that. it seems that there's a constant war between youtube/google and adblockers. in fact, there's a larger war between online corporations and their users. youtube has been making its website and app unusuable for many years now, but only recently have they decided to move to more aggressive strategies. i wonder why.
i'd say that youtube has become too cocky. they are too big-headed to realise that, while being a very large and influental platform, they can't do anything they want. the rule of youtube is very quickly going into its dawn, at least that's what i hope. and yes, i know that it's probably just me scrolling through tumblr through much, seeing posts about moving away from google products, and then thinking that it's a larger trend. i'm sure that people that are not too tech-competent are unlikely to move away from google products. i mean, they're just too damn useful! even i still use google drive and google docs (remind me to remove my writings from gdocs later, future me). but with youtube being so poorly built and developed, that even regular users want to change something, i wouldn't be too surprised if it's popularity will go down in the future years. though, of course, those are just my speculations.
which is why i have personally moved away from youtube. well, not really from youtube. i still watch videos from that platform. certainly i, as a viewer, cannot fully move away from youtube for as long as my favourite creators will remain there. but i can not use the youtube.com website. there are websites that take videos from that platform and display them to you on their own servers. one of those websites which i have decided to use is invidious.io. as they describe themselves: "Invidious is an open source alternative front-end to YouTube."
this isn't a sponsored blog, of course not; this is just a personal recommendation of a service. it might be a bit tedious to get used to the new layout of invidious and the way things work there, but you certainly can move from youtube and let me tell you - it's been a blast so far not using youtube's own front-end. it feels less algorithmic, with no personal recommendations to keep you watching, and watching, and watching. and moving my subscriptions has been rather easy. don't worry, there is a step-by-step guide on how to do it if you are unsure of your technical skills. trust me, you only need to know how your mouse and browser works, that's it.
so find more sources like this! if you have one, doesn't need to be related to youtube, you can message me through letterbird below! let's make the web free, open-source, and certainly not filled with corporate greed.
'Fire in Philadelphia' was used as the header photograph here. No known publication restrictions apply to the photograph. The photograph was found in the Library of Congress.
ways to contact me
if you want to message me, feel free to do so through letterbird.co