Invidious

Invidious is a frontend to YouTube. You can access all the videos on YouTube without having to visit YouTube itself and place yourself at the mercy of Google's trackers. (As far as checking the website using uMatrix and seeing what shows up, only the URLs that lead to the video are loaded.) The most important feature of Invidious for me is that it blocks ads. I come to YouTube to watch videos, not to have some product or campaign advertise to me. Invidious solves this issue.

On a related note, I also don't come to YouTube to see what is trending in the popular culture sphere, or what talk show hosts want to talk about, or what President Trump is doing right now, or what big media and news corporations are reporting on, or what some celebrity said about another celebrity. Maybe these front page recommendations are geared towards what type of videos I watch (which is another point in itself that I will mention in a bit). Rather, I come to watch videos that average peeps like me put out: gameplay, music compositions, animations, and educational videos. Again, Invidious makes the front page much more bearable to look at. You'll still see the things that I mentioned not wanting to see, but they're much less common. Keep in mind that all this is a positive TO ME because I don't like watching those types of videos by news corporations, talk show hosts, etc. If you do enjoy those videos, again, Invidious will still show those here and there.

Invidious also doesn't use the YouTube API or anything, nor does it have Google's trackers, so your recommended feed will not change based on what you watch on Invidious. That's a privacy bonus.

By the way, when opening a video's page, you get to see more statistics about the video, such as its Wilson score and Engagement rating. You also get a button to download the video directly. For the less-technologically inclined who want to store videos offline, this is a good feature. You will also get to see in which countries the video has been blacklisted. I haven't tested this, but I am guessing Invidious will also allow you to circumvent this restriction, so that you can watch any video on YouTube anywhere.

I tried using the subscriptions manager, but it didn't seem to work. This could be a Vivaldi-specific bug, so I'll have to try it with a different browser.

A little tip if you want to use Invidious as your frontend for YouTube all the time: you'll notice that Invidious's URLs are the same format as YouTube's URLs, so you can easily set up a browser extension that will redirect you to Invidious if you click on or paste a YouTube link. It probably won't work for embedded YouTube videos in websites, though.

[Edited by TerrifiedTyphlosion, September 15, 2020] The main invidious instance went down on September 1. Check out instances.invidio.us for some that are still up and running. Personally, I've had the best experience with invidious.tube, but your mileage may vary.

I'd run a public invidious instance if I could...but I have neither a powerful enough machine nor a reliable internet connection. :(