Invidious

Watching YouTube normally means loading Google's player, its ads and its tracking. Invidious puts an open source front end in front of the same videos, and it does not use the official YouTube APIs to do it.

Pages are lightweight and work with JavaScript switched off, with light and dark themes and a homepage you can rearrange. Subscriptions live in the Invidious instance rather than in a Google account, and every channel you follow can raise notifications.

Several features exist mainly to make arriving and leaving painless.

• Data import: subscriptions come in from YouTube, NewPipe and FreeTube, and watch history from YouTube and NewPipe.
• Data export: subscriptions go out to NewPipe and FreeTube, and Invidious user data can be moved whole.
• Audio-only mode: plays the sound alone, which allows background playback on mobile.
• Reddit comments: discussion threads can be pulled in beside the video.
• Developer API: a documented API plus embedded video support for other sites.

You can start on one of the public instances the project lists, or follow the installation docs and run your own. Translations are handled on Weblate across many languages, and the project asks no contributor license agreement from anyone sending a patch.