A few weeks ago I told you about nitter, frontend of X/Twitter that allowed users to browse Elon Musk's social network without registration or advertising. It is based on Invidious, which in turn is a frontend alternative and open source for YouTube. For some time now, there has also been another name alternative Piped, and from what I've tried, this one is worth it, which is not to say that Invidious is a bad option.
what's up with these front end is that they can be modified and hosted on any computer or server. If done right, the service can offer many possibilities, such as the ability to play 4K videos, but if not, we are likely to end up with videos with a maximum quality of 720p. I have been testing Piped on various devices and, at least on this, the first one that worked for me for an app, it does look good quality.
Piped Video is an alternative to Invidious
Talking a little more in depth about Piped without talking about instances would be a bit difficult. In this page website there is a list. The links are from the APIs, but by clicking on them we will go directly to their version of the video service. For example, Garuda Linux has its own instance that appears on your Services page, But Behold the layout of the piped.mha.fi instance, compare it to Garuda's and you will see that, although similar, they are different.
What can be said is that in general it allows you to subscribe to channels, do something similar through an RSS feed, share links, add to the queue and almost everything. There are instances that allow you to register, but only with username and password, without email. This type of registration allows you to take advantage of personalized content, but we do not have to provide any data. By clicking on “register”, what it does (I imagine) is adding an entry to a database with our username and encrypted password. If we want to unsubscribe, all we have to do is click a button. There are even simpler ones, since DuckDuckGo allows you to save your personal configuration using only a password.
On Piped options, then to say that there are instances that have them and instances that do not. The one from piped.mha.fi allows you to change the language, has different themes and in beta interface sounds, backups and 3D layers. I don't like to touch the default options a lot, it seems to me that they are unnecessary, or they are an extra that I will not use too much, but if the browser does not detect our language well and it is displayed in English, this instance does allow us to change the language To Spanish. We can also indicate our country of residence, but for some reason I have come to see how the videos did not load if I put Spain on it, so it is worth not touching too much.
A spear in favor of YouTube, or rather, to the content creators
I, who like to "cheat" some services, also like to do things with a certain ethics. I think you have to pay for any content if you really like it (and we can), and I'm subscribed to a music service in streaming. YouTube is free, and I'm not going to say that nothing is done to avoid seeing two or three ads in a 15min video, but it would be nice to see the videos of content creators on a service that can pay them for their work. If you're concerned about privacy, that's what Piped is for, but I think we should support YouTubers we really like.
And if not, then everything in Piped. He has less time than Invidious, but he has grown a lot more in the last few months/years. Let's hope that Google does not mark a Musk and load it as it seems they have done with Nitter.