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?
Yeah, FreeTube works fine for me, just not all VPN locations. Though the Invidious API never seems to work unless I’m using Invidious frontends on a browser. Just cycle your VPN locations until you find one that works. That’s the benefit of a VPN. They can’t block all the IPs.
But that shouldn’t be affected limiting JS on a browser. JS blocking isn’t a trick, it’s a tool used for the right occasion. It’s not for everything all the time. Even Tor allows JS.
Thanks. Extensions like CanvasBlocker probably mess with the JS, could that be what’s making me get blocked?
Some sites also use canvas blocking as a metric to determine if you’re a bot or not. Bit that wouldn’t affect Freetube. Freetube is its own app, so I would check to see what it has under the API settings. It should fall back to the “local API” which is just your internet connection. The Invidious APIs rarely work for me anymore.
Ok thanks, I’ll check it out.