With a privacy protecting setup, the mainstream internet is almost unusable. To sign up for social media or even a gmail account, one has to provide a phone number for verification. Youtube doesn’t work when not signed into a Google account, or if one is connected to a VPN. Even downloader programs like yt-dlp and freyr have been rendered useless by the strict access controls of the major platforms. There is a vast amount of community, DIY, and educational material of all sorts behind these platform walls, so how can someone who doesn’t want to be tracked access any of it these days?

There are alternatives like archive.org and peertube which are wonderful but have nowhere near the amount of content that people have been uploading to YouTube over the years. For example, if I need to fix a washing machine and there is a tutorial on YouTube, how can I see it while still preserving a modicum of privacy online?

  • LemmyThinkAboutThat@lemmy.myserv.oneEnglish
    1·
    5 hours ago

    Have you tried DuckDuckGo browser? That’s what I use if I need to view something on YouTube. There’s Enable Duck Player in Settings, mine is set up to open a new window (no ads).

    EDIT: No sign up or phone number required. My VPN is always on.

  • Grapho@lemmy.ml
    6·
    1 day ago

    Let’s see if moving some letters around can get us to an answer

    PRIVACY

    PRIACY

    PIRACY

    Theres your answer.

    Seriously, though, if you want audiovisual media like you specified, you either stick to pirating shit off Usenet or browsing YouTube through frontends within your onion browser, preferably using onion mail.

    Other than that (and maybe even then) there’s gonna be at least a few machines that have exactly what you watched and when.

  • NewOldGuard@lemmy.mlEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    When I have to use a big tech platform I use a privacy preserving proxy site like invidious for youtube. The LibRedirect extension for Firefox makes it really easy and has a surprising number of sites it can serve mirrors for

    • fort_burp@feddit.nlOP
      1·
      14 hours ago

      Thanks, I’ll look into LibRedirect.

      Edit: it has that scary “Access your data for all websites” permission…

  • communism@lemmy.ml
    3·
    1 day ago

    It depends on what media you’re consuming? Nearly all the media I consume is text based and works without JS. It’s usually available as plain HTML files or markdown files or similar, or in an ebook format like epub or pdf that I can download and read with zathura.

    For audio-visual content it’s harder yeah. FreeTube and yt-dlp are working for me with Mullvad VPN as of time of writing. Some invidious instances are still working too. But I hardly ever watch YouTube—I think you may find that you miss YT much less than you’d expect, and if Google makes you pick between privacy and YouTube, you should pick privacy.

  • solrize@lemmy.ml
    4·
    1 day ago

    I look at youtube sometimes but I don’t have an account on it. yt-dlp worked for me last time I tried (maybe a few weeks ago) though there is a constant cat and mouse game. I guess it stopped working on age gated videos a while back. Other than that, if anything I would say there is too much video about stuff I would prefer to read about.