I got hit with the “sign in to confirm you’re not a bot today”. I thought I could get around it by firing up a vpn in a GDPR country, but I got the same notice there as well. YT-DLP gives me the same error, but curiously FreeTube, GrayJay, and NewPipe all seem to get around it. I don’t know for how long, but they seem to all be working for now.

I know the proper solution might just be to go touch grass, but I watch YouTube on a nearly daily basis and would like to get it working again in the browser without needing an account and on YT-DLP if anybody knows any solutions.

Also, I follow video/audio content through RSS and didn’t know if anybody had a good way to find out which creators post where. Whenever any creator mentioned they post elsewhere I always replaced the YouTube subscription with a subscription to them on anther platform. When I got the sign in error I went through my favorite creators and searched for them on Odysee and Rumble, finding a small but not insignificant amount of people I follow on Odysee.

Is there a good place to find out who posts where? Any sort of lists of which creators have their own PeerTube instances/channels, post audio content to substack/soundcloud, mirror to other video platforms like odysee/rumble, etc?

Thanks

  • Vince@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Is there something wrong with creating an account with fake info that you use just to watch YouTube?

    • Refurbished Refurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 month ago

      Yes. For one, Google requires phone verification to create an account, and two, you would be giving Google a link to one specific account for every video you watch.

      • refalo@programming.dev
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        1 month ago

        requires

        Not for everyone everywhere apparently. It seems dependent on some secret trust algorithm of your IP/fingerprint/something.

        I made the same claim before and every time, people proved me wrong.

        • delirious_owl@discuss.online
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          1 month ago

          Basically if they can’t link your account to a gmail or something where they know who you are, they will force you to add a phone number so that they know who you are.

          The reason they have this service is to build a profile on you and sell that. They will not let you use the platform anonymously, hence the phone number requirement when they can’t figure out who you are by your fingerprint.

      • Bruhh@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Just made a dummy account and it only asked for a phone number as a recovery method but happily let me skip it. Full 15gb of storage as well.