Published: Thu, 14 Aug 2025 20:48:06 -0800
While I love a good television series or movie, there's still something magical about having centuries worth of videos, submitted by ordinary people, just a few clicks away. I owe the wealth of my knowledge to the various netizens who have detailed their personal interests to the rest of the world through their uploads. While I will rail on and on about the ills of social media, I am weary about when Youtube is lumped in with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, since it still provides a utility of hosting and sharing video, even with the social aspects stripped out. There's just one problem: it's owned by Google.
Of course, if it wasn't for one of the largest tech and advertising companies owning the site, Youtube would have gone under within a couple of years, but it's still something I wish weren't the case. Until the day that a decentralized video hosting site that rewards creators comes online and the masses flock to it, I will have to continue to fight with the beast that is Youtube data collection.
When I was younger, I used the Youtube in the way it was intended, signing in on the site or app, commenting, liking, and subscribing. As I grew older and became more concious (paranoid) about data collection, I merely exported my subscriptions to an opml feed (something that used to be a built in feature on the site) and collected all the videos that came through in my rss feed reader, watching them in MPV through their youtube-dl plugin. This worked great for years, but as time has continued, channels I followed stopped uploading, my own interests have changed, and the list got whittled down to fewer and fewer feeds. I would open up my feed reader and realize that none of the new videos were anything I wanted to watch. Every once in a while I would navigate back to the site and check out if anything caught my eye for a potential new feed to add, but it turns out when the algorithm has nothing to go off of, it will feed you the most generic and mind-numbing crap it has available for your recommendations, resulting in fruitless hunts.
Then I found Invidious, it was exactly what I wanted, a way to watch Youtube without all the tracking associated with it. Sure it was a little rough around the edges in places, but it worked. For a while I used the yewtu.be instance, but after getting fed up with the occasional outages, decided to host my own private one, which was sprung forward by finding Tailscale and not having to deal with port forwarding. It was heaven, for a time.
Then Google started cracking down. First it started blocking IPs that it detected were Invidious instances, which was solved by rotating your IPv6 address and forcing a connection with IPv6. Then every few weeks Invidious would break and you'd need to wait a couple of days for an update to come through to fix it. Then there was a day when it just stopped. Every video you'd click on would give you the same message: "This helps protect our community. Please sign in to confirm you’re not a bot". It didn't matter which instance you were on. After a few weeks I knew what it meant, Invidious was as good as dead in it's current iteration.
So I switched back to primarily using my feed reader, adding a few of the channels I had found, feeling defeated. As the weeks turned into months, any hope I still held for Invidious to return dwindled. At a certain point I accepted defeat, I just started using the main site, not signing in. Of course I knew this was a far cry from privacy with all the fingerprinting that I'm sure is going on behind the curtain, but they had won.
Wile using the site it was somewhat puzzling as to how they knew what I was watching. I rarely watched the video within the Youtube player, instead copying the link to the video and watching it in MPV. I became paranoid about every video I would watch, wondering just what little bit of data the Google overlords had gleaned from my activity on the site. I'd be cautious about every video my pointer would hover over.
I was tired of the paranoia eating away at me. I needed to do something. After some projects at work required me to script some browser automation, I learned about the Selenium project. If what did Invidious in was using the hidden API, maybe just scraping the actual site from what looks like a regular user will be the Trojan horse that can get past Youtube's increasingly strong defences! So that's exactly what I did:
This still provides more information to Google than what I would like, and is in a somewhat precarious position with Youtube's AI verification system potentially coming along, but it has eased some of my nerves. I discovered that almost every video link on Youtube comes with an extra part of the link (an '&' followed by some identifying string) which I presume is used for tracking watch history on a signed out session. There's also a huge preamble of recent search queries that comes along with the page. Debloatube strips all the links of any of this tracking information, just giving you the raw video link. It also allows you to leverage the work that has been put into the algorithm by allowing you to press the "feed algorithm" button on any video. in the background this opens the video in the background browser session so the algorithm sees that you clicked on it and thus hopefully will start putting similar videos in your feed. It also saves me the hassle of having to right-click and select "copy link" since clicking on the video card just copies the link to your clipboard. I have a keybinding for running "mpv $(xclip -o -selection clipboard)", a very useful one to have on the modern web.
This is still very work in progress, but has been working great for what I need it to be and has given me a bit more peace of mind.
I regularly check my email, If I don't respond quickly, send me a poke:
jasco.website@pm.me