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Revanced is free
I used to run YouTube Vanced on my phone for years until Google killed it a few years ago. Since I was already paying a monthly sub for YouTube Music (been using that since the Google Play Music days and had my whole iTunes uploaded there) I decided to spend the extra 1-2 bucks a month for the Youtube Music + YouTube Premium combination, since that seemed like less effort than keeping up with ReVanced builds constantly.
Last month I tried getting a student discount for my subscription, but after a day I got an email telling me Google was canceling my sub for an unspecified reason. I decided not to renew it, and instead downloaded ReVanced, and spent a few days redownloading all the albums I only had on streaming, and integrating those along with my old iTunes folder into my Jellyfin I already had set up for movies.
Now I’m saving 15 bucks a month, and have regained full control over my music library. Feels pretty nice, and the Symfonium music app on Android looks 10x better than the ever-changing UIs of YTM ever did.
Also feels great not to give a single cent to an accomplice to Israel’s genocidal mania across the middle east anymore. I had already severed ties with Google’s mail, photo storage and search a year or two ago. Get fucked Google.
Oh wow! Getting rid of the mail is a little hard. I was trying to do immich for pictures but I’m having a hard time with opening folders to docker. I’m a beginner with docker so I’m on my 4th install try
What was the advantage again, except for seeing a few less ads if you are to stupid to install an adblocker?
YouTube music is pretty good. And a good deal of you already pay for another service like Spotify that you can drop
Yet the FOSS alts are still free. Hot damn.
You mean front ends to YouTube infrastructure? Or stuff like Loops? One of those two are cool, the other is unsustainable if it were to get popular. Well, maybe both? I guess it depends on how the FOSS infrastructure works about.
My proposal: cancel YouTube premium, donate $1 to Smart Tube developer, donate $1 to Firefox. ublock origin doesn’t accept donations as far as I know.
Libretube, smarttube and the like. You realise the amount of bloated shit there is on YT when you use one of those. They are like a front end on the infra I suppose. Not familiar with Loops, must go digging!
YouTube is the new cable, and it will take monumental effort to dethrone it. Hosting video at this scale is expensive. And people loathe having to go to multiple places to get video. Users, including people on Lemmy, want all of their video entertainment on one platform. They hate multiple subscriptions. They hate having their games in multiple storefronts.
There are user behaviors that enable these bad things to happen. And people need to start ranting about these factors and educating people about how multiple platforms are good, actually. Multiple options for account servers are good, actually. Multiple video hosts are good, actually. Paying creators for content is good.
The solution is not to hack YouTube and put a different front end on their infrastructure.
I used to pay less than the single plan for a family plan, split between 5 people. Back when ad-free YouTube was an afterthought and my primary reason for using it was Google Play Music’s unlimited music storage and streaming.
The amount they just increased the cost of YouTube is about how much I’d be willing to pay total for no ads. Until then, they’re competing against zero ads (but no casting) for free.
