Freetube is the best way to watch YouTube

YouTube’s website is a rabbit hole, designed to keep you watching for as long as possible. Free tube won’t cure your addiction, but it can help you take control of your relationship with the video streaming site.

The application gives you complete control over what appears on the screen and what does not. Don’t like comments? Take them out. Don’t want to see recommended videos or want the next video to play automatically? You can also disable that. You can replace flashy thumbnails with more generic thumbnails, replace ALL CAPS HEADLINES with title caps, and generally just turn YouTube into a tool you can use to find and watch videos, rather than a trap to get as much attention as possible. .

And there are privacy benefits too. With Freetube, your viewing history is only stored on your computer, not on YouTube’s servers. This is an application that will help you regain control over your video watching habit.

Watch without tracking or ads

To get started, all you have to do is get started download the application. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux computers (unfortunately there is no mobile version). After installing the application, you can immediately start browsing and watching videos.

You can go to the top video page if you want, or you can just search for what you want and start watching. I find that Freetube produces results faster than YouTube on the web.

Freetube plays YouTube videos via Annoyingan open-source frontend for YouTube that is decentralized. If you use Invidious to watch a video, Google won’t be able to track that you watched it. That is, the fact that you watched a particular video is private. Many different people around the world host Invidious servers:there are public lists of it, which you can open directly in a web browser. FreeTube is unique in that it randomly uses a different instance by default every time you run it. It is the easiest way to use this technology.

But you don’t have to think about that at all: you can use YouTube pretty much as you always have. Search, browse and enjoy. Then it’s time to start the real fun.

Adjust Freetube

You can find Freetube’s settings in the toolbar on the left. Here you can choose the default landing page if you wish: Subscriptions, Channel List, Trending and History are all options. You can choose how videos are presented to you, replacing the eye-catching custom thumbnails with a random frame from the video.

Keep scrolling. You’ll find the option to play videos in an external player, such as VNC, which some people may like. But pay special attention to the Distraction-free settings section.

From here you can disable any UI element that sends you down rabbit holes. For example, you can hide the Popular Videos section. You can hide comments. You can hide recommended videos.

And at the very bottom there are features that allow you to automatically skip certain parts of videos, for example intros or sponsored segments. There’s even support for DeArrow, which lets you replace eye-catching thumbnails with random frames from the video and replace ALL CAPS with title capitals.

Basically you have complete control over what you see and what you don’t see. If you like to customize things, good news: Freetube is the app for you.

How to import your YouTube subscriptions to Freetube

It’s worth noting that you can’t log into your YouTube account on Freetube, so you can’t take your subscriptions with you (but there are instructions for importing your subscriptions if you don’t want to start over). In short, click here to open the Your data in YouTube tool. Click in the first box Moreand then click Download data. Choose how you want your information sent to you (I recommend the email option) and then wait.

If you have the ZIP file, look for the file Takeout/YouTube and YouTube Music/subscriptions/subscriptions.csv. Then, in FreeTube’s settings, find it Import subscriptions option. Point the mouse pointer at the file you just found and you’re done: all your YouTube subscriptions are now on Freetube.

You can import your watch history while you’re at it, if you want: it’s in the Takeout/YouTube and YouTube Music/history/watch-history.json file in the same folder, and there’s an import history feature in the settings.

Once you’ve done this and configured things the way you want, you should feel right at home in Freetube. Enjoy watching videos without Google watching you, and without all the hassle.