Most alternatives are pretty great, but they can never have the amount of content and the reach that youtube has. Youtube has a monopoly and they know it. They can do whatever they want, because you can’t leave.
For the web, there is Piped (github.com/teampiped/piped) and Invidious (invidious.io)
NOTE: Only Piped proxies your videos, which means invidious allows connections directly to Google to load the video.
Android
On Android, there’s NewPipe and LibreTube which are well known by now.
NOTE: LibreTube uses Piped to preserve privacy and (somewhat) anonymity when watching, thus you’ll need to select some piped instance with it.
iOS
On iOS, there’s the web frontends and Yattee (github.com/yattee/yattee).
NOTE: Yattee is on the AppStore, but without any sources/instances by default. Look for “instances” in the settings and add a Piped API URL, like https://pipedapi.kavin.rocks to watch videos from YouTube with Piped+Yattee.
Desktop
On Desktop, there is all the web clients as well as FreeTube (freetubeapp.io).
NOTE: FreeTube has an option to proxy everything or just the videos through Invidious to preserve privacy. It is recommended to enable this.
Would like to add to this that invidious on web can proxy your videos like Piped does but you have to enable it in settings first, not sure when they added it but they have that now
Seconding SmartTube on android TV. No ads, can automatically skip all sorts of content in videos (spoken ads, self-promotion, introduction segments, etc. etc. etc.) I dread the day it stops working.
Invidious. If you look up invidious instances you can find plenty of them and choose one that’s in your country so it’s nice and fast. Sometimes they take an extra second to load but there are no ads so it’s worth it
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