For those not familiar with it, yewtu.be is an Invididous instance, where Invidious is an alternate front-end to YouTube, similar in spirit to Nitter (Twitter), Teddit (Reddit), the late Bibliogram (InstagramProxiTok, and more. Another YouTube front-end is Piped. It's possible to use public instances of many of these, or to self-host your own.
There are browser extensions such as LibRedirect which will automatically, well, redirect requests to these alternatives, with extensive configurability by the user.
<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/>
YewTu.be went offline last week amidst news that Google were cracking down on YouTube viewers employing adblocking.
As to benefits of Invidious and Piped front-ends:
- No subscription required.
- Less data exposure to YouTube /Google itself.
- Lighter website / improved UI/UX.
- One small way of registering dissatisfaction to YouTube for dark patterns / user-hostile site practices.
Invidious: <https://invidious.io/> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invidious>
Piped: <https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped>
Yup, for me I cancelled my YouTube Premium subscription—which I had been happy to pay—because of YouTube shorts. They were constantly pushing them in the mobile app, and sometimes I would succumb and click on one, and then often lose several hours to scrolling. Skill issue, I know, but when I went looking for a way to disable them in the UI I found there isn't one. I ended up feeling like it was a adversarial relationship—they're using dark patterns to hijack my attention to increase their engagement metrics, to my loss—so why would I pay them? I installed NewPipe and subscribed to the creators I watch regularly on Patreon and I'm very happy with this setup.