yattee

Everyone knows that YouTube is a hot mess when it comes to privacy, and I finally got fed up with having to shell out my hard earned money for YouTube Premium. It wasn’t too dificult to find a reasonable solution for my Fedora system… just pop into Gnome Software and install Pipeline. Problem solved there… no tracking, and I only had to deal with the occasional sponsor message in a video. I’ve also got UBlock Origin, Sponsor Block and Dearrow installed in Fire Fox, so things are solved there too. The problem was my iPhone, and how to work around the ads in YouTube there. Thankfully, a little research lled me to an app/server called Yattee. I found a few guides in their documentation about how to install it (it assumes Docker, but I have Podman on my Fedora system and had to modify some instructions slightly to take SELinux into account), and I successfully got it set up. I did have to connect Yattee to an Invidious instance, but that’s quite straightforward to do. Finally, I used Tailscale Serve to create a reverse HTTPS proxy in front of the Yattee server hosted via the Podman instance so I could access the server from the client app on my iPhone regardless of wherever I happen to be. I’ve tested it out, and despite the client being a beta (v2.x) and the server being fairly new as well, it allows me to enjoy YouTube videos without Google’s privacy-invasive BS. Two final notes: 1. The server isn’t exposed to the public internet, and is only available over my tailnet. 2. I use a public Invidious instance, but the integration isn’t for the actual retrieval of videos (that’s handled by the Yattee server, which is YT-DLP based), it’s more for search and metadata retrieval. Maybe not a perfect solution, but it does the job I want it to do.