Had this question in my mind for a while now, after going through the recent Reddit API drama.

I am a big FOSS advocate, and have moved away from YouTube (but not the contents, lol) because of its invasive tracking practice.

I have been using NewPipe on my phone for a long time now, and I think it’s an excellent piece of work.

I believe I also read somewhere that unlike other third party YouTube Apps, NewPipe doesn’t use YouTube’s API, but instead retrieves data by scraping the website via an Extractor.

Recently I came across LibreTube - which I believe has a slightly different approach. It points to a “Piped API” which acts as an “intermediary” between YouTube and LibreTube ( and I think I also heard that Piped API uses NewPipe Extractor underneath) - I am not hugely tech-savvy, so correct me if I sound weird.

All these said and done - in case YouTube decides to turn rogue one fine morning (like Reddit) - will any of these Apps be impacted?

(And while we are here, can anybody please ELI5 for me the differences between Invidious and Piped?)

Thanks in advance !

  • @tryinghappyEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    Great comment! I’m keeping fingers crossed that a reddit app using scraping will show up for when I need to use it.

    • @Zikeji@programming.devEnglish
      3•1 year ago

      There are a few privacy focused frontends for reddit like teddit and libreddit. They exist to fill a similar niche as NewPipe & Invidious - to reduce the amount of data being collected. However, they don’t fill the Sync / Apollo niche.

      I don’t think we’ll see apps like Sync or Apollo using the API unofficially anytime soon, with the hostility Reddit has shown. Then again, all it takes is one motivated developer lol.