alt Hacker NewsInvidious is great. I quit visiting reddit, twitter, instagram, youtube in favor of frontends and libredirect. Has greatly improved my life because I use these platforms less, but also the peace of mind. Invidious seems to be the least reliable of the bunch of frontends, which makes sense because it is the most bandwith.
At some point I will set up a yt-dlp thing to download the videos I want because the public instance invidious experience recently has not been great. I could also try a self-hosted invidious.
Something interesting is considering the privacy benefits of watching the content on a privacy frontend while sitll talking directly to youtube. Does it prevent the fingerprinting? Does it improve your privacy significantly?
I imagine the shared frontend proxy approach is best for privacy, but is not reliable currently.
photon-reddit.com has been a gamechanger for one specific feature—it lets you recover deleted comments and posts. But, I have found it less reliable than redlib.
Try dragging a youtube video URL onto an MPV window. I believe that should use yt-dlp under the hood. Not that much privacy since they still get your IP and you have to browse for the videos somewhere else as well, but great for minimal ad-free playback. Haven't tried this in a while though, but last time I did it worked perfectly.