FreeTube

title: FreeTube
published: 2025-02-20

YouTube is one of the services I wasn’t able to abandon, as of yet. Too many people still upload their content there, instead of aiming for more independent and free platforms. I admit though, that hosting lots of videos just costs a lot of money. However, browsing YouTube has always been a nuisance for me.

I’m using LibreWolf as daily browser, with uBlockOrigin running in medium mode, blocking all 3rd-party scripts and frames by default. I manually allow individual requests whenever I feel good with the compromise. So out of the box on YouTube nothing works. Even if I allow requests to another server, it happens that a video stops after 60 seconds or I have to reload the page multiple times, but I’m also unwilling to allow all the trillion requests to several google servers.

https://librewolf.net https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium-mode

I found FreeTube only yesterday, but it seems to offer all the settings I was missing. Among other things, I can choose (and did so) to

• disable search suggestions
• disable subtitles by default (YouTube did weird things on that end)
• not autoplay anything
• not fetch any feeds or blog posts automatically
• hide everything I don’t care about (trending/popular videos etc)
• even Display Titles Without Excessive Capitalisation And Punctuation
• not remember any watch or search history
• use my local Tor service as SOCKS5 proxy

https://freetubeapp.io

Of course there are plenty of further settings for theming, localization etc., I can even set an external video player or configure parental control to show family friendly content only (and I can set a password).

It is a really nice bandwidth of settings and I’m thankful for that!