Hello guys, I have noticed that all the big internet services are starting to get worse and worse. And I am forced to migrate to foss alternatives. I have moved from Windows to OpenSUSE, from Reddit to Lemmy, etc. But I have an issue with moving from youtube. It is not that my favourite channels are not bringing me alternative they do but it is somewhat fragmented. Some of them are on PeerTube, some on Floatplane, and some on Nebula and I would rather pay those than youtube. My issue is that each of these has its app and I would like to have them united in one app to which I link all my accounts to. Does something like this exist?

  • shrugal@lemm.ee
    3·
    1 year ago

    You can’t really make your favorite content creators switch to other platforms, so the best thing you can do for now is use a privacy-preseving frontend for YT. I can highly recommend Piped for PC and LibreTube for Android. They allow you to watch all YT videos and manage your subs/playlists without having a YT account or using the YT site or app. You can even self-host a Piped server if you want to.

    Edit: So the major difference between Piped+LibreTube and NewPipe is that Piped is a website that handles the YT scraping and sub/playlist management for you, and the LibreTube app just connects to it like the YT app connects to the YT website. This means you can access it from your browser, synchronize your subs/playlists between devices and also hide your IP from Google servers. NewPipe accesses YT directly from your phone, so it has to do all that by itself and on every device separately.

    Basically:

    • YouTube app or browser => YouTube website (has user data)
    • NewPipe app (has user data) => YouTube website
    • LibreTube app or browser => Piped website (has user data) => YouTube website
      • obosob@feddit.ukEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        The main difference that has me using LibreTube rather than NewPipe is because my subscriptions are on my piped account so they are synced between phone and desktop (browser). Piped is built on top of NewPipe’s extractor library anyway.

  • mister_monster@monero.townEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    https://codeberg.org/mister_monster/youtube2peertube

    I made this to help people solve this problem.

    More on the “I want all my things in only one app” complaint, this is a marketing tactic by companies like YouTube. It’s not a reasonable expectation. If you want to watch videos, they’ll be on the video host that hosts them. Imagine if all the websites were on one website. That would suck, just like youtube and reddit. Just get over it.

    We do have a technology to help us though, it’s called RSS. You can subscribe to just about anything using it, including youtube and peertube channels. Any website that doesn’t have RSS is not worth subscribing to.

  • guts@lemmy.ml
    1·
    1 year ago

    I highly recommend SmartTube for Android TV, YouTube with no ads and SponsorBlock.

  • sub_o@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    It’s hard, I’ve been trying to use peertube, but it’s still kinda lacking. Most creators are still sticking with YT

    On the other hand, I download youtube videos I want to watch using yt-dlp. That’s been working well for me for the past 5 years or so.

    • vd1n@lemmy.ml
      0·
      1 year ago

      Can you eli5 yt-dlp? I’ve seen it around but I’m not sure how to use it. Sounds like something worth putting on kodi?

      • sub_o@beehaw.orgEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        it’s a library / command line software to download youtube videos.

        There’s more information here

        Basically install the tool, and run yt-dlp [put your youtube links here without the bracket] to download the video. I haven’t directly used the official command line for years though, so you might want to read the documentations.

        And that’s because, I wrote my own terminal-ui using their python API, for personal usage and requirements (you need to know at least some python or knowledge using the terminal to use it)

  • 1984@lemmy.today
    11·
    1 year ago

    Best advice right now is to install F-droid (package manager) on your phone and then Newpipe. Newpipe can import all your subs from YouTube.

    Then you just use newpipe and don’t have to use other services. Nothing is as good as YouTube today, and since it costs so much money to own a video service, only big tech corps can afford it.

    Peertube is a good alternative but its just not polished enough and the content is questionable. Video is harder than a reddit replacement.