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Invidious: Open Source YouTube (with Dark Web Access!) #invidious #foss

Given that YouTube is owned by Google and Google controls the world (more or less), you might be tempted to look for some alternatives at some point.

There are two that I happen to know of, one of which I covered on the other blog. The first is NewPipe, which I was using for quite some time until the app started to have issues and wouldn't show videos anymore. It may be that I didn't have the latest stable release, however.

The second, as the title says, is Invidious, which has both clearnet and onion links! I thought I'd quote part of the description on AlternativeTo.net, since it covers some of the major features:

## Official Onion Sites: * kgg2m7yk5aybusll.onion * axqzx4s6s54s32yentfqojs3x5i7faxza6xo3ehd4bzzsg2ii4fv2iid.onion

Features:

  • Audio-only mode (and no need to keep window open on mobile)
  • Open-source (AGPLv3 licensed)
  • No ads
  • No need to create a Google account to save subscriptions
  • Lightweight (homepage is ~4 KB compressed)
  • Tools for managing subscriptions:
  • Only show unseen videos
  • Only show latest (or latest unseen) video from each channel
  • Delivers notifications from all subscribed channels
  • Automatically redirect homepage to feed
  • Import subscriptions from YouTube

  • Dark mode

  • Embed support

  • Set default player options (speed, quality, autoplay, loop)

  • Does not require JS to play videos

  • Support for Reddit comments in place of YT comments

  • Import/Export subscriptions, watch history, preferences

  • Does not use any of the official YouTube APIs

  • Developer API

I especially like that it's available over Tor, although it seems that you do have to enable JavaScript for it to work properly (if that's something you're opposed to, then this site may not be ideal).

So far, I haven't come across any video sharing sites that don't require JavaScript, so you're out of luck in that department.

Here's a good screenshot of its onion site:

As I said above, it's open source as well, so here's its GitHub repository if you want to check that out: omarroth/invidious: Invidious is an alternative front-end to YouTube

You may want to compare YouTube, NewPipe, and Invidious side by side to see which one you're the most comfortable with.

One other feature that I like on both NewPipe and Invidious is that they make it simple to download videos as well, which YouTube doesn't (not surprisingly).

Play around with these and let me know which is your favorite!