PigeonDuck, the Invidious app that looks like YouTube

Nov 12, 2026

If you were used to YouTube and found it hard to switch, third-party apps for Invidious covered a large part of your needs, from Apple TV to Roku, Kodi, iOS and beyond. It’s one of my favorite parts of the whole Invidious ecosystem.

Still, I know most YouTube use revolves around the website itself, which Invidious only sort of resembles.

That changes with an aspiring YouTube lookalike built on my instance’s API. I can’t say opening the API was the best thing I’ve ever done for the instance, but a few people have found it useful. One of them built PigeonDuck (opens in new tab) , a UI that came out of a long stretch of conversations after I first announced the open API.

One thing that always bothered me was the missing recommendations. The subscription feed works when someone I like posts again, but it doesn’t match the experience of opening YouTube and just being told what I might like. Not all YouTube viewing is a mindful journey through the soul; sometimes I’m honestly pretty brainless.

PigeonDuck builds a recommendation feed from your current subscriptions. I have a huge backlog, so there’s always plenty to watch whatever the day. I’d say that’s one of the biggest draws of this alternative UI over Invidious’s simple Popular feed, which, honestly, I’ve never even looked closely at.

What you get is what I think is a beautiful reconstruction of what YouTube would look like without things like ambient mode: a fast website built on the API that lets you switch backends just like Invidious, something apps normally can’t do because of how the API balances load.

I’d usually dismiss anything that isn’t fully native, but connecting to something that feels like YouTube is part of the charm. YouTube has changed a hundred times over, and creators still made themselves at home on a platform that was never really built for them.

There’s nothing really wrong with how YouTube is built today. It has adapted hard to support so many people with even a passing interest in making videos, and it’s no surprise there isn’t much competition. It’s the other factors, and the lack of any real alternative, that justify Invidious’s existence, at least for me.

PigeonDuck is one step toward making me feel at home again on a platform I’ve used since 2012. It’s a reminder of memories long gone in the pursuit of commercialization and profit, but also a beautiful reminder of how much connection matters. Even as I have less and less time to enjoy it, it’s still a wonderful resource that more people should tap into. And if you’re like me, you just miss the way things used to be.