Ditching YouTube (Kind Of)
I recently wrote about how YouTube was throttling my connection. I'm sick of YouTube's shenanigans, so I've ditched them...kind of.
After publishing that post a lot of people got in touch to say they were experiencing similar issues with YouTube, and many gave me tips on how they got around the issue.
There were a number of options open to me, it seems, but the overwhelming advice was to use a 3rd party YouTube front end, like Invidious.
My solution
There's a tonne of public Invidious instances out there, but I wanted a place to call my own, that I control. I wanted a private Invidious instance that only I can access.
I have a Synology at home, and a quick DuckDuckGo search later, I found this post by Marius Hosting on installing Invidious on a Synology, using Docker.
Making Invidious available from anywhere
Ten minutes later I had a working Invidious instance and I had imported my YouTube subscriptions, but I wanted a way of making it so only I could access it, even when I'm not at home.
So I gave my Invidious instance a domain, and setup Synology's reverse proxy to proxy all Invidious traffic to the port I had exposed in Docker. But by doing this, I was exposing my instance to the world too. Not very private...
Luckily for me, Synology has Access Control built in, and I have a VPN service with a static IP, so I added my VPN IP to the Access Control setup, and I could then access my Invidious instance from anywhere. All I have to do is connect to my VPN first. If someone on a different IP tries to connect, they just get a 404.
Stop The Madness!
I've been using Invidious for a few weeks now and it has been absolutely brilliant. It works flawlessly, there's no ads, and everything is private to me.
However, after a few days of use, I realised that there were a couple of scenarios where I still ended up on YouTube:
- Someone shares a YouTube link
- I explore the YouTube homepage for new videos / channels
I really wanted to fix these issues so that whenever I click on a YouTube video link, it redirects me automagically to my Invidious instance. Nicolas Magand got in touch and mentioned Stop The Madness , which is a browser extension that fixes all kinds of Internet shittiness - it's a great tool.
Anyway, by using Stop The Madness' redirect feature, I was able to redirect YouTube watch URLs to my Invidious instance. So I can still browse the YouTube homepage for new content, but when I want to watch something, that happens on Invidious.
Similarly, if someone shares a YouTube video with me, the request is automatically redirected to Invidious. 🎉
Final thoughts
Overall I'm really happy with Invidious. The service is great and everything works flawlessly. I wanted to make a donation to the project, but they only seem to support crypto currencies. I strongly object to crypto currencies, so I won't be making a donation unless they offer another means of donating.
Aside from the donation thing, Invidious is fantastic and I think I've finally been able to ditch YouTube...kind of.
Want more?
So you've read this post and you're still not satisfied? Ok then, here's some other stuff for you to do: