In recent years, YouTube has evolved into a platform that offers both entertainment and countless educational and informative videos from all areas of life. Around 3.7 million new clips are added to YouTube every day. Large numbers of general IT and special Linux videos for every level of knowledge are also available on the platform.

But what looks like a great thing on the surface also has its downsides. In addition to the annoying ads, the fact is that YouTube links with your Google account causing an outflow of information that undermines your privacy. If you're wondering what kind of information is easily obtained from your browser, check out websites such as Device Info [1] or Am I Unique [2].

Of course, YouTube is not the only service that disregards privacy. Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, Imgur, Meet, and many other services also use information about you and your behavior online as hard currency. The privacy threat posed by these cloud-based platforms has sparked the development of alternative front ends – redirects that act as generic proxies between the server and your router at home.

Many of these redirects remove ads, hide unnecessary content, and prevent the ubiquitous tracking that companies use to generate user profiles. You can choose from around a dozen redirects, such as Invidious, FreeTube, or Piped to watch YouTube videos without direct contact with the Google servers. Tools like ProxiTok (for TikTok) and Proxigram (for Instagram) offer similar protections. These tools work because they stop the original website from seeing the connection from your web browser.

LibRedirect

A tool called LibRedirect [3] offers a single interface that groups 36 privacy-protecting alternatives to online services. LibRedirect redirects services such as YouTube, Instagram, Google Maps, Reddit, TikTok, and many others automatically or on demand to privacy-friendly front ends. You can even set LibRedirect as your default search engine, and it will redirect your requests to the privacy-friendly SearXNG meta search engine.

LibRedirect is a fork of the discontinued Privacy Redirect project. The current version is 3.0.2. If you need a redirect for X (formerly Twitter), just install release 2.8.1, which is available on GitHub. The subsequent versions removed Nitter [4] as an alternative because there were too many problems with X. However, users report that Nitter still works if you use LibRedirect 2.8.1 and a special Nitter instance.

LibRedirect, published under the GPLv3, is available as a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome and therefore also supports other web browsers that use the same render engine. Beyond the browser option, you can also use the LibRedirect Frontends Manager [5], which is available on Flathub for managing your redirects; the Frontends Manager allows quick access to some services, but otherwise it offers little in terms of functionality.

Provisioning

You can add LibRedirect directly in Firefox via the settings in the Addons and Themes page. Enter LibRedirect in the search mask (Figure 1). For Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi, or Opera, download libredirect-version_number.crx, which you then add in the browser's developer mode. This procedure also applies to ChromeOS [6]. On Android, you can integrate LibRedirect with Firefox for Android in the same way you would add it in the desktop version.

Figure 1: The extensions for Firefox include some add-ons with redirect in their name. LibRedirect appears first in the search list.

Using Firefox as an example, once the LiRedirect add-on is installed, click on the extension icon to open a list of frequently used services that you can redirect using a switch. At the end of the list below Settings, you will find all the supported services, with options to configure how to handle the service (Figure 2). The configuration includes selecting the desired front end if several alternatives are available for the service. Many services offer a number of instances in the Fediverse for you to choose from. Alternatively, you can set up your own instance online.

Figure 2: In the Settings window, you can specify how LibRedirect handles each service.

When you click on a YouTube link in the future, for example, it will take a little longer than usual to open. By default, the video opens in the alternative Invidious service instead of on YouTube (Figure 3). If the video takes too long to open, it can help to switch to another instance with less load.

Figure 3: Invidious is an alternative YouTube player that offers settings for video quality, playback speed, and subtitles for the clips.

You can define your preferences in the settings. Right-click on the link of a supported service to conjure up an entry for LibRedirect, where you can choose whether you want to launch the original or the alternative (Figure 4). For convenient use of Invidious outside of LibRedirect, see the box entitled "Invidious Router."

Figure 4: The LibRedirect menu item in the Firefox context menu offers several options.

Conclusions

Redirecting might not be the easiest solution, but it is still a good thing that services like LibRedirect exist. Once you start working with LibRedirect, it will take a while to find the services, instances, and preferences that suit you. Sometimes services stop working temporarily after an update. Keep in mind that it is in the interest of the original services to impair or completely prevent the use of these redirect tools. The best example of this is Nitter, as an alternative to X. Elon Musk had the API blocked after the Twitter takeover. LibRedirect is constantly tilting at windmills.

The only advantage of LibRedirect over the individual alternatives is that it combines management of all redirects in a single interface. Offering all alternatives in a single interface means that you can switch quickly if one of the detours does not work as desired. Any problems that occur with individual applications are not the fault of the LibRedirect developers.

The Predirect [8] extension is an alternative tool that redirects many common services, and it still supports X via Nitter, although it does not offer some of the configuration options available with LibRedirect.