Freetube

Edit: In my experience Piped or Invidious gets rate limited often and stop loading videos for a while and I need to change instances. Freetube doesn't have that problem, the only times videos stop working is when youtube changes something, when that happens I use Freetube to grab the video link and run a script to download with yt-dl and watch on the mpv player.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Directory for downloaded videos:
DL_DIR="$HOME/Downloads/yt"
mkdir -p $DL_DIR

# Video player:
#PLAYER="xdg-open"
PLAYER="/usr/bin/mpv"
#PLAYER="/usr/bin/smplayer"

# Downloader and options:
YTDL="/bin/yt-dlp"
YTDL_OPTS=(--no-playlist -S "res:1080" -N 5 --add-chapters)
YTDL_DIR_OPTS=(-P "$DL_DIR")

set -e

CMD() {
  printf "[CMD]: "
  printf "\"%s\" " "$@"
  printf "\n"
  "$@"
}

# Get URL from clipboard if run without argument:
if [ -z "$1" ]; then
  URL="$(xclip -o -sel c)"
#  CMD qdbus org.kde.klipper /klipper org.kde.klipper.klipper.clearClipboardHistory
else
  URL="$1"
fi

# Get video filename
printf "[URL]: %s\n" "$URL"
FILENAME=$("$YTDL" --get-filename "${YTDL_DIR_OPTS[@]}" "$URL")
printf "[FILE]: %s\n" "$FILENAME"

# Download video
CMD "$YTDL" "${YTDL_OPTS[@]}" "${YTDL_DIR_OPTS[@]}" "$URL"

# Play video
CMD "$PLAYER" "$FILENAME" >/dev/null 2>&1

Do you mean for sharing links on Lemmy/the Fediverse? There was discussion around this a while back and in the end the consensus was that it was most useful to just use the direct YouTube link as the primary, then optionally include a link to an alternative front-end. That way it was easier for people to use their own preferred front-end, and it avoided a problem we were sometimes running into where enough people would try watching a link at the same time that it would overwhelm the alternative.

Non plus ultra: Download the video and then upload to whichever PeerTube instance you use. At least if you're confident enough that this won't cause you legal trouble (e.g. cases like "fair use" should be safe).

FreeTube has a neat function to download comfortably (but make sure to pick an option with both audio and video).

I have been trying out Greyjay -> https://grayjay.app/#faq

There's a few more on libredirect.github.io