Workarround by MS, switch the UA of your browser to Windows Mobile https://alternativeto.net/news/2023/10/windows-phone-user-agent-allows-you-to-block-youtube-ads-as-a-temporary-workaround/
Another (better) one is to use an userscript
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/477725-youtube-iframe-adblocker
You also can watch YT on desktop with the SMplayer, sandboxed in the search results in Andisearch or in the Vivaldi Feedreader without ads, if you don’t like to switch continuosly between front-end instances.
A lot of channels from YT are also in Odysee
More FuckYT scripts https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts?q=youtube
Possible solutions: invidious.io and piped.yt
I suspect that’s a growing pain. Same reason it happened on Lemmy, especially right after the reddit API changes.
Seems to me YT is just blocking the instances so they have to move their servers constantly. Big or small instances, both get blocked every few days. Thankfully there are enough instances, so you can always hop. But it does require more intervention than Invidious, which doesn’t proxy your requests to Google.
Right? It’s like they don’t want people to have an account on their site.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=zOg8DVY9pwM
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Probably a good sign it is doing something useful if YouTube thinks it is an adblocker.
