After seeing the AI age verification bullshit that was the last straw for me after literally witnessing Google slowing down my videos because I use an adblock; I made an Odysee account and migrated over to it from YouTube.
(Surprisingly, a lot of channels that I follow upload there as well.)
And I think it is a pretty solid video streaming platform. I have had zero issues with it. Apparently there are no ads, it’s decentralized, you can see the dislikes and actually discover a lot of interesting niche channels to watch. After a week of using it I realized I am not going to the YouTube anymore and Odysee is becoming more and more my “go to” place for watching a few videos and relaxing after a long day.
What do you think of it? I am not tech-savvy, so I might be missing something, but I just wanted to say that I am having a pretty good experience with Odysee.
Here’s how to drop YouTube in a much more easier fashion. Start by weaning yourself off the algorithm. As the algorithms may as well be big tech corpos way of pushing out drugs on the users to keep them scrolling; enslaved. I’ve also blocked all big tech and mainstream social garbage platforms via my PiHole server, along with a huge blacklist for my SearXNG instance for filtering search results (but that’s a whole other topic). The removal of all the noise of the Internet has done wonders for me, which also helped my creativity come back so I could pick up writing again, digital art, and pick up learning Japanese again.
Anyway, to make YouTube less relevant to you, start using Invidious instances: https://api.invidious.io/?sort_by=health. And use these scripts that I personally had ChatGPT devise for me for the sake of my sanity (you’ll need TamperMonkey for these):
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/548556-invidious-clean-view-with-list-view-of-thumbnails-and-threshold-control
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/548558-invidious-remove-all-caps-mrbeast-keyword-channel-filter-with-exclusions-redirect
**Oh, and use LibRedirect: ** https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/
Also, so you are less tempted to go to the YouTube domain itself, add these to your hosts file:
#Youtube Block 127.0.0.1 www.youtube.com 127.0.0.1 www.m.youtube.com 127.0.0.1 accounts.youtube.com 127.0.0.1 youtube.com 127.0.0.1 m.youtube.com 127.0.0.1 youtube-nocookie.com 127.0.0.1 www.youtube-nocookie.com 127.0.0.1 img.youtube.com 127.0.0.1 i.ytimg.com 127.0.0.1 yt3.ggpht.comWhen you do all of this, you finally will get clarity and see that YouTube really doesn’t have all that much to offer in the end. I know I did.
Now, to avoid any potential algorithmic manipulation in the future:
For Odysee (also Bit-chute and Peertube), use RSS. Follow only things you want to follow. I personally use RSS Guard with JavaScript filtering as well to play my videos with; so, I hardly have a need to open a web browser anymore.
I decided to share all of this because it really helped me free myself from anything Google now; yes, even went back to a flip phone and standard MP3 player. I hardly have a need to search for anything on Invidious instances with all the RSS feeds I have of available content creators now. But the filtering really helped.
Hopefully my solution is great for someone. They just have be willing to take the initiative.