I’ve seen the effects on invidious these past days. 8 in 10 instances have been broken. Google is putting some serious work into shutting alternate frontends down. Shows you how much of a dent they’re putting in the bottom line.
Shows you how much of a dent they’re putting in the bottom line.
Or how desperate google execs are to get even the tiniest bump in revenue.
LINE MUST GO UP AT ALL TIMES
GrayJay is the only one that seems to still work without issue but it’s getting updates very regularly.
Invidious and YouTube piped (and LibreTube) by default load the videos server-side, as opposed to GrayJay, NewPipe or Smarttube.
It has advantages (mostly that your IP address is not shared with YouTube, and it allows users from countries where YouTube is blocked to still access it) and inconvenients (much harder to keep up when YouTube actively seeks to block them).
Invidious shares your IP with google, it does not act as a proxy
I guess this reply lost its “by default” part on the way 🤔
I’m pretty confident that you are wrong.
Fair enough, that’s interesting. I assume this only applies to the non-web clients. On the web, it would not be possible. You can verify by looking at the outgoing network requests on this random video for example: https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=qKMcKQCQxxI
On the web, it would not be possible.
Why not?
hopefully they come up with a workaround.
I doubt it’s denting the bottom* line as much as the recent court rulings. And I doubt it’s as much paying bills as it is paying vested interests.
I remember Hooktube. That was when front ends were still trying to play nice by accessing youtube the “right way”.
They killed that one off pretty hastily.
Invidious was the hero successor, but I think we all knew that it would eventually come to this. Invidious’ most recent fixes for blocking involve passing identity tokens, making a concession that Google is then better able to track users behind Invidious.
I’m not sure how much farther there is left to go on the technical angle of this fight.
It’s about time we try to de-google.
YouTube and my existing Gmail is the only thing tying me back. And the occasional Google maps. I don’t even use the rest of their services anymore
THat sounds great! Gmail can be easily replaced, by like Proton mail or something… Youtube is also very hard… It’s a vicious circle, “Youtubers” try to host their content elsewhere but nobody is looking. While some users also want to get rid of the youtube platform, but since most people are still and keep watching on YouTube, the content creators keep uploading there…
Gmail can be easily replaced, by like Proton mail or something
Except for the fact that you’ll need to update your email address in so many places.
If you do move to a different provider, make sure you use your own domain. It’s way more professional, and it lets you move to a different provider in the future without having to change your email address again. I’ve had one of my email addresses for a bit over 20 years across a bunch of different providers.
The paid version of Protonmail lets you have up to 3 custom domains. MXRoute and FastMail let you use your own domain too. MXRoute supports unlimited domains and addresses; you’re just limited by total disk space.
If the email address is important to you, it’s better to use a paid service since it’ll usually give you proper support and an SLA.
+1 for MXroute. I have unlimited domains with 25GB of storage for $30 every 3 years. So less than a dollar per month. Looks like they are still offering it. It’s more than enough for email especially considering the Gmail account I used for 15 years was under 5GB.
I switched to them at the beginning of the year so about 9 months ago and have not had any issues.
MXroute are great. I switched to self-hosting my email server using Mailcow a few years ago, but still use MXroute for outbound email (meaning my SMTP server relays outbound email via MXroute). They’ve got deliverability figured out and have several fallbacks - I think if all of their outbound servers fail to send the email, they retry via Mailbaby and Mailchannels.
Agreed, if you can effort is, buy a domain and use it for email. I also have melroy at melroy dot o r g. However, I still redirect my mail, since I don’t like paying for services haha. That being said, I’m planning to setup my own mail server (I finally now have the infrastructure at home and static IP, needed for this).
Anyhow, DNS also needs to be replaced by something better.
Forwarding is a decent approach too. Just note that it’s not 100% reliable (due to limitations around spam filtering) and you will sometimes have emails that get dropped.
yeah I know… It’s not ideal. I don’t recommend it.
I need a YouTube mirror on the darknet so I don’t reach them directly
It’s still youtube… And if you talk about Tor, the Tor network is not gonna like this kind of traffic. Video streams are too heavy for the Tor network. Maybe I2Pnet… But again, it’s still Google YouTube.
You’re right. This kind of thing is best done on I2P. It’ll be PeerTube just with ripped videos from YouTube lol
highly reccomend Grayjay and Freetube. Futo claims to be foss but it is only source viewable (my apologies having a brain fart and cannot remember the actual term.) which to my knowledge means you can see the source code but not redistribute it. They ask for a one time $10 payment but the app functions the exact same with or without payment. Grayjay does not have a desktop application but they are looking for someone with experience to develop one. Freetube is open source and contains extra addons like de arrow and watching from invidious instances along with a desktop and mobile application. It’s UI is less appealing than Grayjay ( at least personally) but it’s the only way I watch youtube on PC now and I use Grayjay on mobile. Both of these contain sponsorblock too! ;)
If you watch YouTube on an android TV you can sideload smart tube TV, which is ad free as well. While I personally don’t reccomend it you can sign in with your yt account on both grayjay and smart tube to impket subscriptions.
If you are looking for a solution for YouTube TV… Well… You may need to sail the 7 seas and live with not watching live (unless others have a solution for this.
Fuck Google.
What I want is a platform on I2P which has a collection of residential proxies to connect and scrape YouTube. I guess that’ll work for Invidious too, but I just really like the idea of a huge community staying and interacting in I2P which will help its adoption (of course, the service must be P2P and not relay video directly like Invidious does now)
I’ve been slowly working on it for the last year or so. It’s gone a lot smoother than I thought it would.
All of us together!
I agree. But to be very honest, de-googling is very important but not always very easy. So I did personally move away already from Gmail. I also now host my own Nextcloud instance, which I use for my agenda as well as contacts. Meaning I also don’t sync or store contacts or anything in Google. I don’t use any cloud services for storage either, again Nextcloud (self hosted) solved that for me.
Then I was never using ChromeOS, so that helps, I’m only using Linux. However, I do have an Android device. It’s really hard to get rid of that, maybe a custom ROM, is that valid? Anyhow, and last but not least Google search, Google images, Google maps, etc. I don’t want to go from Google Search to another big Microsoft corp, so moving to Bing is a no go. That also means all those meta search engines is also not a good alternative, which includes: DuckDuckGo, ecosia and alike… Qitchain, presearch or Yacy isn’t working for me either. It’s just not good enough.
Thus finding a good search alternative is hard! I’m actually considering as a software engineer to build my own.
I’m a YouTube creator, part of the partner program, and I also manually upload to TILvids. The videos I make generate about $100-$300 a year through the partner program, so I’m not a professional by any means. It feels like they’re trying to keep creators from leaving by putting up small roadblocks that limit our reach beyond the platform. Given PeerTube’s non-profit model, I see it as a potential future for content sharing. Though there are a few rock stars on YouTube, most of the creators on that platform make little to no money from publishing videos. There are more people like me than Linus Media Group.
I would guess a significant number of “creators” are motivated by the idea of eventually becoming a hit and making much more money, though. And wouldn’t really do it of they didn’t have that dream.
Not sure what percentage, though. Maybe less than I think.
Yeah its really too bad how Youtube treats other video creators. Its a strange world. Hopefully peertube (given enough time) will have some viable options or at least an alternative. Is there any other platforms that work with video creators like yourself? I personally dont know of too many other than maybe twitch? I haven’t been keeping up.
The other day someone on lemmy kept trying to tell me that if google wanted to shut down ad blocking they would. But they don’t, so it’s ok.
Lol, spawn me that person plz.
I wonder if these services are on small cloud providers. If so then they can just block their entire CIDR.
I wonder if they were to move to GPC if they would have better luck.
Im seeing it from a residential IP. I think its more they have an allowlist rather than a blocklist nowadays. But I can only speculate. Piped stopped working a month or so ago on my personal instance and updates dont fix it. I can imagine for video uploaders, the issue is worse.
Instead of blocking IPs, Google would just shut them down
This can be problematic for Peertube’s adoption.
If user only uses Peertube to upload, they likely wouldn’t notice a thing from this, but if it’s a creator from Youtube that’s trying to upload to multiple platforms this can cause major problems for ease of use and since the Peertube user base is small to begin with, this can potentially damage Peertube in the long run.
That doesn’t sound like it’s an incredibly difficult problem to solve from a technical standpoint, if the creator is the one being hit. Just need either a software package – or, if the limitation here is content creator bandwidth, service – that pushes a video to multiple streaming video providers.
Might be an issue for third-parties creating mirrors of YouTube content, though.
Yep thats whats happening here by the sound of it. TILVids is a very small instance that shares donated $$ with their creators. Its a very good way to try and keep creators on the platform.
What are some good larger/general purpose peer tube instances? Last time I checked tilvids was one of the largest I found, so I seem to have missed a lot.
Heres some options:
https://fedidb.org/software/peertube (some are NSFW/very little moderation).
I like maker-y or general kind of instances like:
Hope that helps!
Are there any clients that support multiple instances? It would improve my feed if I would see content from several instances at once.
They all do, but if im honest, I subscribe using mastodon to have a peertube “List”.
This is what it looks like:
Interesting. Gotta try that.
I have P2Play installed. It only supports 1 instance at a time. 🤷
I’ve noticed a few people on Reddit taking about getting possibly shadow banned on YouTube, myself included. With no real explanation why? Every video just comes up as “content not available” when logged in. It started a week ago or so. I wonder if this is all related?
I’m honestly surprised peertube has lasted as long as it has as it is
It still lasts because there’s no easy way YT can offer their own content without the video being available as a file stream (through CDNs at googlevideos subdomains). If they centralize everything to a single, controlled domain (so to allow things as one-time HTTPS request, better session checking and so on), they’d lost the capability of load balancing allowed by the decentralized nature of CDNs. YouTube downloaders (and, by extension, third-party YT frontends such as Invidious) exploit this CDN aspect to download the videos.
It’s common to see Invidious instances momentarily blocked. The blockage can’t last forever for two reasons: firstly, IPs (especially IPv4) changes due to how ISPs offer IPv4 addresses through CGNAT, so the instance IPv4 (generally domestic servers) will eventually change (often to a completely different IPv4 range) and YouTube won’t know that the new IP is a former “offender”. Secondly, as IPv4s works through CGNAT, Google can’t keep the bans forever because this IPv4 will be eventually rotated to another client from ISP that’s completely unrelated and unaware of how their IPv4 was a former address for a downloader. It’s like how Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/Facebook/phone-required services can’t really keep a permanent ban for a specific prepaid number (especially on countries like Brazil, where ANATEL allows for phone number rotation when the mobile plan is cancelled), because the number will be potentially owned by another person with nothing to do with the former owner.
So, in summary, Google can either end with YouTube CDNs (ditching their load balancing), or they can try to implement an innovative way to keep load balancing while serving the request one-time only, or they won’t be able to do nothing but to perpetually catch themselves drying ice cubes.
I took full advantage of invidious while it was still working, now I am anxious of ever going back to YouTube. It won’t be long before they requiring giving them your iris scan before watching a video on that shit platform.
yt-dlp remains unaffected for now.
yt-dlp is only affected when YT changes their algorithms (breaking yt-dlp data scrapping capabilities) or when it’s used frequently with the same IP address (leading to automatic IP blockage). If you’re using yt-dlp sporadically, it shouldn’t be affected.
Is there a gui interface for that anywhere? I really can’t be bothered to learn the command line just to download a couple vids here and there. Especially when freetube still works for now. But if the barrier to entry was a little lower, I’d start backing up faves.
Hmm. Per Facebook v. Power Ventures, it could be a (criminal) violation of the CFAA to “circumvent” IP blocks.
Oh yeah, still don’t know how to use Peertube.
Oof.
“Google shouldn’t be allowed to operate as a loss leader” - Reddit and Lemmy
“Paying for the service? Fuck that” - Also lemmy and Reddit.
Amazing. As if these communities are made with thousands of people having different opinions.
And here’s mine: since Google used their position to essentially destroy any competition in this area, why should be my duty to protect their revenue? Even if I can afford to pay their services, I won’t and will actively discourage anyone else from doing so, by installing uBlock, ReVanced, NewPipe, SmartTube, GrayJay etc.
You can have a diverse community that has a large majority opinion. And what I said is certainly the prevailing opinion.
And to answer you about your personal view: You are stealing the right to distribution and taking money away from both corporations but more importantly creators. And I’ve seen the rates of direct donations eg patrons . It’s not ideological for most people, it’s about getting content for free.
Are you donating to every channel you are watching? I doubt it. Even the people who care mostly only donate directly to one of two top patrons, while still consuming many many more.
If you are actually donating, then good for you, I congratulate you for living what you preach and have zero qualms. But you would be a statistical edge case.
Why give money to YouTube when I can give it to my favorite creators, and the developers of the alt yt clients/mirrors I use?
Because you have not set up that agreement and the vast majority of people don’t pay outside of ads or a singular monthly sub.
The next best thing is nebula which has 600,000 monthly subs at $5. Which means a maximum payout pool of 18M a year.
Look at the number of users vs donations. The only reason this place works is low traffic and low bandwidth. The vision you describe would be great but it’s not going to happen. ESPECIALLY once users are forced to pay rather than getting shit for free.
You don’t need all, or even most users money. Plenty of people make enough money off of the portion of their fanbase that pays them to not only survive, but thrive and grow.
You don’t need all, or even most. You don’t need this to be the norm for it to be sustainable.
Oh right, in the magical world where people are giving their money away. The majority of content creators would of left your platform. But it’s okay it’s easy to steal their right to distribution and handwave it away as not a problem.
This isn’t some magical world, this is how most open source software projects and even online content creators make their money.
Creators make way fucking more from patron than AdSense, even if its only a percentage of their audience. Do you know how much fucking watch time it would take to match the $5 a month I give to several of my favorite producers of online video?
A lot more than either your or I have time for, certainly more than the content they create.
You need only a sliver of your audience to pay, and platforms like patron prove this works.
The fact you’re baffled by even a small percentage of people donating to gratis projects says a lot about how you value volunteer labor, and its pretty fucking sad.
The large majority of open source tools that are used in mass have significant commercial backing.
Yes many users could make more money from patron only. Very few do in the tall world. Their primary source of income is YT. Because people don’t use the patrons.
What are you fucking on about lmao? Most channels that run a patreon, use it as their main source of income unless they also sell merch.
Everyone from giant channels like Linus Media Group, to medium and small-sized ones like Technology Connections, and Cathode Ray Dude.
I mean pretty much everyone I watch that has talked financials has mentioned how important patron is.
Some of them like Botgrinder literally for the most part, only make money through patreon because of YT’s restrictive demonetization guidelines. Yet despite the lack of ad-revenue the guy is able to live off of a 50k sub channel where he pretty much smokes weed and flies FPV quads.
As for FLOSS, that heavily depends the projects. Huge ones used by corporations sure, but who’s footing the bill for newpipe, Yt-dlp, Jellyfin, Pihole, And pretty much every video game emulator ever written? People like you (probably not considering your attitude), and me.
