Alternatives to YouTube

YouTube belongs to Google and is probably the hardest video platform to walk away from entirely: the content it hosts is often unique, and the creators you follow publish almost exclusively there. The alternatives listed here aren't ways to watch the same videos "in disguise" — they're genuinely independent platforms.

PeerTube aims to build an entirely different ecosystem — decentralised and federated: many independent servers can exist, interconnected, each with its own catalogue of videos. The overall catalogue is obviously more limited than YouTube's, but it's growing, and the model without advertising and without algorithms designed to keep you glued to the screen has an appeal of its own.

If you're just looking for a way to watch YouTube videos without ads and tracking, without switching platforms, you'll find alternative frontends (like NewPipe or Invidious) in the Alternative frontends section. Keep in mind though that almost all of these frontends still fetch videos from YouTube's own servers: they strip out ads and visible tracking, but they don't mask your IP address from Google.