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Recently I have feeling pretty down and quite dejected from watching YouTube. I keep getting in my feed a lot of videos that on the surface I think I would be interested in, but in reality they end up being nothing but a waste of 30 minutes. I think the recommendations that make me the most bothered to see are those videos that are just some fuckass covering a drama from a person you can care less about. I could not care less about what DumbassYoutuber2817 did or what’s GenericDramaYoutuber7193’s opinion is on the matter. And YouTube’s little “I am not interested” button never seems to work with these kinds of videos.

YouTube Shorts got to be the worst thing YouTube has ever added to the platform. Most shorts are literal slop, although there are some good stuff on Shorts, mostly from science youtubers and the like. However the vast majority of shorts has just enough substance to keep you hooked and watching for as long as possible, until you snap out the shorts cycle realizing you just watched 3 hours of shorts and you barely remember anything from the past three hours. And that editing that most of these videos have, from the extremely annoying subtitles animation, to the excessive sound effects that shorts often use is very very overwhelming.

Another thing that I gotten sick of seeing is how much AI trash has shown up on my feed. I get these video recommendations of videos that on the surface sound interesting, but the thumbnail looks fucked up, any text in that thumbnail looks like an incoherent mess, like it was written by an alien trying to figure out what English is (and then cursing the English for creating such a dogshit language, lmao). A couple days ago I decided to open Shorts for the first time in months while in an incognito window, and the first short I got? An AI generated mess of some animal getting stuck in a snake pit, and other animals coming to the rescue of said animal. The video is crude, animation errors are abound, like objects not following the laws of physics and the snakes in the snake pit jumping up and down comically unrealistically. But it of course probably got a shitload of views. Because of course it did.

behold, a list of shame of AI videos that I found in my feed:

To add insult to injury, YouTube decided to add that stupid AI age estimation system. Now YouTube will judge the content you watch on their platform, and then assign an age estimating how old are you. If you’re unlucky enough to be considered a child, well guess what! Now you need to take a picture of your fucking ID, so Google can take this data and target ads and build an online profile of you “protect you”. Of course collecting IDs is a stupid fucking idea. Are we gonna trust these companies with our personal information considering the track record many of these have had in the past?

So seeing all this, I decided to try out third party clients, which are a way to watch YouTube without signing in, which should in theory make it more private. And it keeps everything from your watch history and subscriptions and playlists stored locally, which are things that Google can take and use them to target more ads to you. And if I can manage to move my subscriptions and playlists away from my Google account, this means that I can eventually get rid of that account some time in the future.

Why Freetube?

Originally I was planning to pick Grayjay, but there are some issues related to that program. The first one is that the desktop program is still pretty undercooked, and often crashes or fails to play video out of nowhere. Syncing in the app across two devices works for the most part, but to be honest? It is still not that great. You need to keep the app open on the devices you are attempting to sync across and hope that all the changes happen without any incidents. Also I know deep down that if I go and start fucking around with the syncing solution inside the app, something will break, sooner or later.

Grayjay also doesn’t allow me to import my playlists directly from the Google Takeout archives, which are in the CSV format. Instead I would need to deal with the in-app sign in with a Google account. To be honest, this kinda breaks the purpose of what I was trying to achieve since I had to sign in. Anyways, once finished, I can finally import everything from my main account, but it seems that Grayjay doesn’t really like dealing with a large number of playlists, with some of them with over 3000 videos. Grayjay froze when it got to 100% during the importing process which caused me to force quit the app, and once I got back, there were some playlists that remained suspiciously empty, as well as a lot of duplicate playlists.

So this means that Freetube would be the client I will be using. It supports Windows and Linux, and there is also an unofficial port of it to Android.

Syncing

In a perfect world, I would just need to connect my phone and laptop to my PC and sync everything that way without having to do anything else. But this is not the world that we live in, and no other third party clients that I know of has that kind of syncing built in, aside from Grayjay. This means I would have to figure out a way to fix this, or suffer forever with importing everything manually every time I add a new video to a playlist.

So to avoid that, I decided that my best course of action would simply try using Syncthing: it works for syncing Minecraft worlds, Yuzu’s save folder and games folder, music, photos from my phone, my art… Syncthing is pretty rock solid, but I didn’t know if I could simply sync Freetube’s config files across two devices and just call it a day.

I found a blogpost talking about my exact issue. It mentions where the files are, and mentions what files and folders should be blacklisted to avoid (most) syncing conflicts. After following said instructions, it worked. There is also one thing that I did differently from the guide: I didn’t create any symlinks, and I simply just pointed Syncthing to the ~/.var/app/io.freetubeapp.FreeTube/config/FreeTube directory on Linux and %appdata%\FreeTube on Windows. It seems to be working well for the time being.

There are a couple problems with this approach: Let’s say you, john user, decide to leave your computer and go to your laptop to watch whatever. You spend a couple hours, and then decide to close down Freetube and just do whatever. Later you get back to your computer and then find that Syncthing is now pointing out a bunch of syncing errors, all this because you forgot to close Freetube on the PC. And now you have to figure out which of the two files is the good version of the file.

This is of course not ideal at all. Syncing stuff this way is very jank and can cause errors. But until I find an alternative that has syncing built-in like how Grayjay does it, this is simply the jank we have to deal with, lmao. For the time being, I will have to remind myself to create backups every couple of weeks just in case.

The phone issue

I like to sometimes watch YT on my phone, sometimes as background noise, or other times when I am in bed and don’t feel like dragging out that stupid gaming laptop. Revanced has served me very well for this, but it is still pretty much the YouTube app with some mods bolted on to it. It still is tracking you, and while you won’t get ads, I kinda just want to be able to keep my subscriptions and playlists away from YouTube and under my control.

Newpipe is pretty much the go-to for those that want a third party client on Android. It looks good, works well, and is pretty fast. The downside? It doesn’t support syncing, and if you have two devices with Newpipe, you would pretty much have to deal with managing everything manually.

There is always that one port of Freetube for Android however, but after using it, I realized that the current state of it is not really good. There is no picture in picture support, which is a basic feature that most music players should support out of the box. Not to mention that the app has the feeling of being a couple taps away from crashing out of nowhere that keeps me weary of fully using it.

At the end, I decided to just use a fork of Newpipe called Tubular, which has Sponsorblock and other cool QoL features built in. It is not perfect: I can’t really sync it with Freetube, nor can I really export the playlists from Freetube to Tubular (maybe there is a tool out there?), but Freetube does feature support for exporting subscriptions directly to the format Newpipe expects.

To be honest, I do miss my iPad. It covered a middle ground between the portability of my phone and the large screen of my laptop, but that tablet was very locked down and caused me so much headaches when I tried doing something Apple didn’t want me to do. (See this and this). I kinda want to get my hands on a Microsoft Surface tablet or something like that, and turn it into a Linux tablet, and install Freetube on there. Another possible alternative is to get a Steam Deck and install a general Linux distro on there, idk lmao.

Dealing with playlists

Google Takeout gives your subscriptions and playlists in the CSV format. Freetube can handle the subscriptions part, but the playlists? Not at all, This means that you’ll have to figure out a way to either convert them to the format that Freetube expects, or add each video manually. Thankfully there is a tool that can convert the CSV files to .db files that Freetube expects. It took a while to export, but after that, it worked pretty well.

Final thoughts

I really do like Freetube, it shows me a feed of the most recent subscriptions and I can also save the playlists there too. There is no algorithm, which honestly is a breath of fresh air. And this is all without Google’s tracking, which always is a plus. While there is many arguments to be made about how this is nothing but a temporary bandage over a gunshot wound (since third party clients don’t fix the biggest issue with YouTube which is the fact it is a monopoly on video sharing), it can certainly help it be less annoying anyways.

Tangent 1: PEAK, Deadlock and other games

Recently got my hands on PEAK, and to be honest? It is a much better from other co-op games (so called “friendslop” games): this is mostly because unlike Lethal Company, or REPO, or any of these other games, PEAK is good because there is a final goal to reach, which is climbing the mountain towards the peak. In comparison, Lethal Company feels like aboring game in comparison. Also doesn’t help that I am kinda tired of the co-op horror genre, and even REPO which is probably the best out of the genre is already getting old.

In other news, I finally got invited to the Deadlock playtest. I went into the game completely blind and not knowing jack shit. I found out that it is like someone took League of Legends and made a third person shooter out of it, and it is actually good. I downloaded the game and joined a bot only lobby, just to see how everything feels. And it was pretty fun to be honest. Of course, I suck shit at the game, but that is to be expected since I never played the game. Movement in the game feels pretty good, performance on what is now a low-mid range GPU (the RTX 2060) is also pretty decent (around an average of 130fps). I will certainly be playing more of this game soon™.

Tangent 2: trying out mastodon again, and well…

I seem to not be able to wrap my head around Mastodon. I think the issue with Mastodon is that I can never find content that I want to see, like video games that I like, and my friends also don’t really use Mastodon so it doesn’t help. I try searching terms like “Wandersong” or “Oneshot” which are two games I absolutely love and enjoy, yet I barely get any results, or any art related to the two games. Additionally it seems that artists on the platform are either very hard to find, or Mastodon hides them somewhere and I need to find it, or the search function on the site is massive bullshit. Who knows.