I got hit with the “sign in to confirm you’re not a bot today”. I thought I could get around it by firing up a vpn in a GDPR country, but I got the same notice there as well. YT-DLP gives me the same error, but curiously FreeTube, GrayJay, and NewPipe all seem to get around it. I don’t know for how long, but they seem to all be working for now.
I know the proper solution might just be to go touch grass, but I watch YouTube on a nearly daily basis and would like to get it working again in the browser without needing an account and on YT-DLP if anybody knows any solutions.
Also, I follow video/audio content through RSS and didn’t know if anybody had a good way to find out which creators post where. Whenever any creator mentioned they post elsewhere I always replaced the YouTube subscription with a subscription to them on anther platform. When I got the sign in error I went through my favorite creators and searched for them on Odysee and Rumble, finding a small but not insignificant amount of people I follow on Odysee.
Is there a good place to find out who posts where? Any sort of lists of which creators have their own PeerTube instances/channels, post audio content to substack/soundcloud, mirror to other video platforms like odysee/rumble, etc?
Thanks
Self hosted invidious with trusted-session-generator works for me.
On accessing Youtube: I’ve been using FreeTube for years and it’s great, it even has support for Sponsorblock, and your subscriptions are stored offline in the app, among other benefits. For the browser, there is also the Libredirect extension, which you can use to easily redirect to Piped or Invidious instances.
If you manage to get yt-dlp to work (btw check that you have the latest version), I’ve also used the “play with MPV” Firefox extension in the past.
Freetube is great, the android version has a few bugs so sometimes I use newpipe instead.
I’m using https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local and it’s working without issue.
Newpipe or grayjay on mobile. Freetube on desktop.
Cool
Some Invidious instances are still partially functional.
Change VPN exits
To what?
Another VPN exit. Just keep switching until you land on one that happens to have less people watching YouTube from it at any given moment.
What one works for you?
About one out of every 4 mullvad. It changes all the time.
Tor
Is there something wrong with creating an account with fake info that you use just to watch YouTube?
Yes. For one, Google requires phone verification to create an account, and two, you would be giving Google a link to one specific account for every video you watch.
requires
Not for everyone everywhere apparently. It seems dependent on some secret trust algorithm of your IP/fingerprint/something.
I made the same claim before and every time, people proved me wrong.
Basically if they can’t link your account to a gmail or something where they know who you are, they will force you to add a phone number so that they know who you are.
The reason they have this service is to build a profile on you and sell that. They will not let you use the platform anonymously, hence the phone number requirement when they can’t figure out who you are by your fingerprint.
Privacy conscious users with their addons/settings, most likely they will.
Just made a dummy account and it only asked for a phone number as a recovery method but happily let me skip it. Full 15gb of storage as well.
Interesting. Maybe it’s because I’m using a VPN and a privacy-oriented web browser to mitigate fingerprinting.
Yes, privacy
How much longer will each of us keep using YT? It feels like the end is coming. Of course it all depends on each person’s values and choices. And how fast YT tries to ratchet us down.
