TL;DR version:
From June to August, the number of active users of the AdGuard Ad Blocker extension for Chrome dropped by about 8%. But in late August, the trend reversed. The temporary slump in user growth was offset by the increased demand in the second half of the year.
After a brief period of turbulence that lasted about a month, we saw the trend stabilize. And while the daily number of uninstalls was still higher than before YouTube’s crackdown, it remained consistently lower than the number of daily installs.
After media reports and YouTube’s own statements implied that ad blockers were doomed, and especially after more and more users started noticing that their ad blocking extensions were not working properly on YouTube, we did indeed see a spike in uninstalls. However, at the same time, the number of installs also increased significantly! It may well be that the way ad blockers’ woes were amplified in the media inadvertently boosted their popularity and helped them woo new users.
The takeaway from all of this is that ad blockers — first and foremost, ad-blocking extensions — were rocked by YouTube’s onslaught, but survived. And, moreover, the interest has rebounded, as is evidenced by the growth in the number of active users.
That may be it. There’s a bot on lemme thst responds to all YouTube links with piped links, and I’ve tried to follow those directly. I was unaware of an app. Thanks.
Oh, I didn’t know about the bot. So I guess that’s Piped (https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped) which is a frontend like invidious (https://github.com/iv-org/invidious) and usually when it doesn’t work switching instance should do the job.
Newpipe is a different project: https://newpipe.net/
On desktop you can also use FreeTube: https://freetubeapp.io/