Switch YouTube
YouTube: First step is to stop using youtube.com and the official YouTube app to access the most famous video platform. Between the heavy user tracking, the intrusive ads and the annoying video suggestion from their keep-you-addicted-algorithm, you don’t lack reasons to look for an alternative. Of course you still want to access this large video library, so just do it using FOSS alternatives as a front-end. Invidious allows you to browse, search and watch YouTube video from your browser without any annoyance from the original website. In principle this app must be self-hosted on your server but you don’t even have to, as you can find hundreds of public instances already free to use. Just select one from the list, change if it’s offline, too slow or not in your taste. My favorite at the moment is YewTu.be hosted in NL that offer good selection of filter for the trending videos visible on the home page.
Another way to access YouTube is using app like FreeTube (desktop Linux, Windows and Mac), NewPipe (official, Android) or NewPipe x SponsorBlock (fork that add sponsor segment skipping).
All these app offer you to watch YouTube videos without being heavily tracked by Google, without pre-video ads, to download video for offline use and to subscribe to channels without a Google account (using RSS feed). On top of that FreeTube and NewPipe x SponsorBlock optionally allow you to use a crowdsourced database of timestamps that mark videos for segment that are sponsored content. As soon as the person start saying “and now a message from our sponsor” the video skip automatically to the end of the sponsored content! That’s really magic and powerful. Just be fair and if the person you follow and like offers other ways to support his/her work (like I do with my donation page), you should consider to donate some money as he/she will earn absolutely zero from you by using such app and sponsor skipping add-ons.
The next step is to use complete alternative platform for consuming your online videos. PeerTube is a FOSS and federated alternative to the YouTube website. Anyone can install an instance on his server and run a YouTube-like service. Of course you might not want to host a video website, what you want to look for is one or more instances with good contents according to your tastes and interests. Some instances can offer videos from other instances (federated), some are local only. You can search instances here (sorted by total number of videos).
Good instances I recommend:
TILvids (many contents, especially Linux, open source and privacy related)
Kraut Zone (general content, one of the instance with the most videos)
Dalek Zone (general content, including TILvids videos, almost as large as Kraut. No tracking)
BitcoinTV (Bitcoin related contents)
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