355
That's absolute bullshit youtube, they don't need any locational stuff, other than to sell to advertisers.
.>:(
“This will allow YouTube to locate the best content.”
It’s the blatant bald-faced lying that really gets me. They’re openly broadcasting how little respect they have for you, that they think you’ll swallow that as a valid reason not to function.
It’s as if some manager at Google deep down knows he’s a piece of shit who belongs in a gulag, and is subconsciously trying to bring it about.
“This will allow YouTube to locate the best content.”
Ads are technically content, I suppose.
This will allow YouTube to locate the best content.
But that you do that is the reason to use a VPN/proxy.
I don't use proprietary, known evil services which require me to authenticate.
oh wow...
Enshittification proceeding nicely. I use Freetube on the desktop and Newpipe on my Android phone. I have ExpressVPN on my router.
I browse with invidious and just download whatever videos I want to watch with yt-dlp
The "best content":
Geeeez looking back at this hurts so much in so many ways
For me it's almost the same, but the text on the thumbnail are in Hungarian, one is a clip channel of a crappy Hungarian Twitch streamer, and one is one of those channels that plagiarize content via translation and got his fame by plagiarizing an English video accusing all furries with zoophilia.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Which country gave you this prompt?
I'm trying to say give up YT, not worth it anymore.
Canada
Change the VPN server/location.
That's why VPNs give you hundreds of options. You should be changing your VPN location anyway based on the pseudo-profile you want. VPNs aren't magic, they're just tools.
Other options include:
Searching for the video with DDG or Startpage and playing the video via their search
Using an Invidious frontend
There’s such an easier fix: just stop using a service that has zero respect for you.
I assume you mean YT here, and not the VPN?
Absolutely that’s what I meant.
I have this set up on my router. My wifi is blanket tunneled through a VPN. For annoying sites that restrict access like reddit, my router routes through a specific VPN server that doesn't (yet) get blocked (I don't post/comment/browse, but occasionally find a post that answers a question). That way it works on my whole home network, regardless of device.
Same could be done for YouTube presumably, but maybe a little more complicated (reddit seems to work with a single /32 address).
Plus, it's fun to set up---MikroTik router, Mullvad, and an ARM SBC doing the VPN duties for me, but myriad ways to get it working for other configurations.
For reading reddit you can just use a redlib frontend and never get blocked. When I get the "woah there, pardner!" I just take the URL from the /r/ onward and paste it after a frontend URL. Takes 2 seconds.
Also, setting up a router level VPN is just an OpenWRT config on plenty of routers. Depends on your firmware how many servers you can have listed to bounce between. Otherwise just bounce more per device.
I have a Firefox add-on that automates that. Reddit links get redirected to a random redlib instance. It's pretty nice.
Yeah, one of the issues I was having with running VPN on router is that you need a somewhat beefy router if you want to use your full bandwidth---my router maxes out at about 90Mbps with WireGuard, even though it can NAT around 1Gbps (which is our service).
I implemented two workarounds, one was to use my access point as a VPN router since it had a beefier CPU, and the other was to just use an ARM SBC with Linux to handle that task. (I ended up with the latter, as the former ended up maxing out at around 400Mbps, and introduced some additional headaches.)
I'm doing a crude version of this with a Flint 2 router and Mullvad. Don't enjoy fiddling with my network (and upstream is unreliable for now, making troubleshooting an irritating game of crossing off doubts each time I have issues, rather than learning things better).
At the moment I just have a guest Wifi that doesn't get VPN'ed for things like Roku devices and such (slowly migrating the home away from stuff like this).
I appreciate the always-on "blanket" traffic tunneling, a lot. But I'd like a more flexible setup - things like allowing access to Jellyfin from guest Wifi (or similar), site-specific exclusions or other workarounds for when I need to reach a banking site that has predictable VPN complaints, etc.
Not a fan of just playing house-wide VPN exit whack-a-mole each time myself or someone else experiences an issue, but maybe that's part of the game.
Know of any good starting points for the flexibility I'm describing? Probably just need to learn LuCI and firewall and VLAN principles?
I also have an SSID that doesn't get VPN'd, though my DNS is always VPN'd.
As for accessing JellyFin, etc., I think we have somewhat different setups. My self hosted services are by default accessible without a VPN (SSID is on a VLAN with e.g. 192.168.0.0/24, servers are on 192.168.1.0/24, router routes between them). For the blanket VPN'd SSID I have a routing rule that routes over the main, not VPN, table, so local services can be accessed.
So: local traffic has a rule to route without VPN, reddit routes with a specific VPN, and general traffic routes with a different VPN.
There are lots of VLANs involved in my setup, and I'm sure it's overly complicated and has gaping security issues, but it's just a home network and it's kinda fun :(
Haha don't sweat it, I certainly won't be poking holes in your config. Thanks for the rundown!
Freetube probably
The very, very best content. Content so beautiful it makes you go "hmmm, what beautiful content". Can't serve no wonderful content with that nasty VPN on, no sir.
I'm on proton vpn and it works fine for me. I'm using YouTube through Firefox though, not the app, because fuck the app
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If you turn VPN off, you lose.
Exactly!!!
YouTube has been trying to block VPNs for months now. Especially one that offers a free one like Proton. Just switch your VPN server till one works. They're always playing tag.
"Tag"? I think you mean Whac-a-Mole...
The only time I had this issue, I jus used ytdl-p to bypass while still keeping my VPN up. The video was not really worth it, but at least I could watch it.
I am also on Proton VPN. 2 days ago Google search wouldn't allow me to search at all because it couldn't confirm my age.
I switched to a different server and it worked, but that shouldn't have made a difference, since I was sigbed into the same google account.
Strangely enough, this happened about 30 ish hours after I started self hosting my own searxng.
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this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2025
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