Selfhosted

Freetube on Linux, newpipe on android and maybe a private invidious instance.

I use YT-DLP to scrip the download of vids I want to watch and it drops them into Plex for me. I set it to run every 4 hours.

Grayjay

grayjay, it's an app developed by Louis Rossman to combine a lot of streaming platforms into one privacy and security respecting app. it does have billionaire backing tho if that yanks your chain

Freetube on desktop works beautifully. They just added playlists too

I use a private Piped instance

I just watch it on youtube.com without logging in. Sacrificing convenience and using some frontend that only work if you pray hard is not something I want to do daily-drive

NewPipe on my phone. I don't have PC I can use rn but when I used to have one I'd just use my browser (mainly Firefox) with ublock origin to watch YouTube (without signing in).

yt-dlp Web UI

A nice docker friendly front end to yt-dlp. I use it to watch YouTube on iOS devices where ublock origin is not an option.

I use a self-hosted invidious instance, and despite the recent issues with Google trying to block them mine works behind Mullvad VPN.

I use the web app on desktop, and Yattee client on my phone/ipad

NewPipe or PipePipe.

I don't watch a lot of youtube, but DuckDuckGo browser (on Android and Windows, at least) has a Duck Player that removes all of the cruft around videos and is private afaik.

Self-hosted Invidious or public Invidious instances.

https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

On Android try NewPipe, but dont expect algorithm recommendations, just the main trending pages. Same for iOS use "unwatched"

Grayjay on my Android phone. I like that it supports a lot of different services, and I have subs on Odysee, Rumble, and Nebula (I pay for a sub there). I sometimes download videos for offline use if I'm going to listen on my commute or something (no point in using up data if I don't need to).

On my desktop/laptop, I just use YouTube directly w/ uBlock Origin on Firefox (to block ads) without logging in. I don't watch much YouTube on my desktop/laptop, and when I do, I'll just look for a specific video or whatever.

I also have NewPipe installed on my phone for when I want to find something specific (i.e. background music or something), because Grayjay's search kind of sucks.

youtube-local over a Mullvad (other services like Proton or IVPN are great as well) works really well for me

With invidious and in FreshRSS I use the youtube extension to use the embedded video player, you just need update this part of the code https://github.com/FreshRSS/Extensions/blob/master/xExtension-YouTube/extension.php#L153-L163
It easy just to replace for this:

    public function getHtmlContentForLink(FreshRSS_Entry $entry, string $link): string
    {
        $domain = 'www.youtube.com';
        if ($this->useNoCookie) {
            $domain = 'www.youtube-nocookie.com';
        }
        $domain = 'invidious.personal.com';
        $params = 'quality=dash';
        $url = str_replace('//www.youtube.com/watch?v=', '//'.$domain.'/embed/', $link);
        $url = str_replace('http://', 'https://', $url);
        $url = $url . '?' . $params;

        return $this->getHtml($entry, $url);
    }

The only change is to use $domain = 'invidious.personal.com';
And add the parameter quality=dash

Seems there's also this one https://github.com/tunbridgep/freshrss-invidious
but haven't tried it

Newpipe or libretube

I sub to channels and use Youtubes recommendations and new for you to find additional channels etc but I don't watch them I use Metube and a browser plugin and download the videos to a directory. I don't get all the privacy but I also am not giving them much watch data and I can avoid the ads.

NewPipe