Invidious: Make Youtube cool again

Youtube

I have a complicated relationship with Youtube like, I imagine, a lot of people.

While I really dislike everything that Google is doing with the platform and

their idiotic algorithm, there are tons of exceptionnaly good content on the

platform.

You can find everything regarding computer science, 3d printing, physics talks,

video games, history and so much more. It's full of dedicated people

talking about their passion. I used to only use the "Subscriptions" page of

Youtube. The default home page has always been irrelevant, and the Popular tab

is just plain cancer.

Everything was good. I was going on Youtube, checking new videos from

people I liked, and that was it.

Then came the change of algorithm, a few years back. New videos from content

creators were not always showing up in my feed. The more the time passed, the

less I was using the Subscriptions page. Instead I found myself using more and

more the default homepage. And in the beginning of that period, it was not that

bad. It showed a lot of new things and I discovered even more awesome content

creators.

But you had to be mindful about what you were watching. You had to censor

yourself because if you start watching something you usually don't watch out of

curiosity, you end up with your home page filled with crap you are not

interested in, and you have to play the algorithm game. Tell it what you like,

and what you don't like, all giving more and more information to Google.

Plus I found myself mindlessly scrolling in order to find new things. They were

slowly winning. And I was slowly loosing.

Algorithm junky

As more time passed, the addiction became clear. I was not addicted because the

algorithm was only finding gems, no. I was addicted to the fact that while doom

scrolling I could potentially and eventually find something great. I went from

searching for what I wanted to watch to scrolling until Youtube found something.

And that was when I decided that I needed a change.

Invidious

Enters Invidious. It's a FOSS alternative front end to Youtube. There are

multiple instance deployed, but I decided to run my own. Invidious only uses

Youtube for very specific things, mostly playing a video.

https://invidious.io

But the rest (ie subscriptions, watch history, etc) are all local. There is no

algorithm. You subscribe, you get a chronologic feed and that's it. You also

have a Popular tab, that shows popular videos (based on views, I believe) but

only from your subscriptions (and the ones of other local users, in case of a

shared instance).

The website is also stupidely simple. No bells and whistles, no mandatory

javascript, no animation, no popups asking you to become a member of whatever

shit program every two days, no ads, no chat.

It's basically feeding on Youtube's video collections, whithout giving them

anything in return, which is something I really enjoy. Screwing up Google for

once.

Creator support

Obviously, for the creators themselves, that are caught in the system, it's not

optimal, but there are a lot of other alternatives to support them rather than

having to be fed with irrelevant ads every 2 freaking minutes, and that's the

road I'm taking.

Closing words

So all in all Invidious brought back what was cool in Youtube, putting content

creators at the center, and not advertisers. It makes navigation really fast and

easy, without any UI dark patterns. It works well on mobiles too. As for

administrating it, it's very easy. It's a total win and I thank the Invidious

devs for their awesome work!