Today most Invidious instances are experiencing very harsh ip address rate limiting, it is becoming very very hard to watch yt videos through
As much as I like the privacy frontends I think ‘we’ have to move to alternative platforms sooner than later and pull the bandaid vs. continuing to indirectly be dependent on google as the base platform.
Content creators won’t follow because there isn’t any monetary incentive to do so. I have been regularly checking out Peertube for 4 years now and it is mostly a backup option for those that one day YouTube might delete their channel.
I remember early YouTube where there wasn’t a financial incentive to make content and they clearly did not suffer from a lack of content.
People weren’t saying “Oh, well, you can’t make money on YouTube so why would you” back then. They made content because they wanted to and because it was fun.
YouTube is just entrenched in the public consciousness much like television was when YouTube came around.
I hate saying that it was different back then, but it just was. Social media was not seen as the way normal people become famous the way it is now.
It was just people attempting to create cool stuff and find a community.
The way we have PBS and NPR, I really think we need to start talking about community shared content hosting. It could go a long way in preserving knowledge without succumbing to corporate greed.
community shared content hosting
It’s technically still a thing you’re not supposed to do, for the most part. Still something can be sued for, civilly liable, and when you get to hosting for a massive group of people, you’re risking entering criminal liability territory. However, private torrent trackers exist, and those generally function as those types of communities. Some trackers even have nice people on them.
Further, the depth of knowledge these people have about encoding/color profiles/sound engineering etc. is fucking astounding. It’s always people doing it for the good of the community who seem to have the most real competence over a variety of disciplines. It’s not surprising a lot of them live and breathe FOSS and GNU/Linux.
I am talking about publicly funded data hosting.
It wouldn’t be used for piracy, obviously, but for what people were originally using YouTube for.
Think of all those video series from back in the day where some random dude just walked you through step by step of a house building process. Those videos are still there, but no matter what you type, you are unlikely to find the videos you really need. Just fully forgotten by the algorithm and buried on page 14 or 15, long after you gave up.
Whereas your local National Public Hosting affiliate would have every reason to prioritize that content.
It’s an interesting idea, but as many have pointed out before: if you tried to propose Public Libraries in modern America, the idea would be shot down.
This proposal is Public Libraries on steroids and opens a lot of questions about ownership of the data and who can request their data be removed, etc. If its publicly funded, they can’t hide behind “we own all this content because you uploaded it” like, say, Facebook does. They would be much more liable for people wanting to control their data, and if people wanted videos removed, they’d have fewer legal precedents to lean on.
Like I said, interesting idea, but it raises a multitude of questions in my mind. Who do you entrust to run it? Would it be a government organization, or something more like the BBC, where it’s government-funded but separated?
I don’t necessarily know how the British system is different than the US or Canada but I am a strong supporter of the US and Canada model where the federal government essentially funds the infrastructure and then the other 80℅ is through donations and fund drives and the government by law can’t dictate the actual content beyond ensuring a certain percentage of funding is earmarked for educational material.
But yeah, people should decide if what they upload can be deleted
Wait, what? I don’t think they were talking about piracy. They sound like they’re talking about something more like a C-Span type thing, envisioned as a YouTube alternative.
Compare the production values of channels like e.g. philosophy tube and old AVGNs. Times have changed.
Philosophy Tube is available on Nebula. I think that place is a viable alternative to YT if you’re mainly watching educational stuff.
It is but there’s just not enough content to get me to fully stop YouTube yet. YouTube still has so much long form content only on YouTube.
That being said, nebula is amazing and you all should check it out and support the creators using it.
It is but there’s just not enough content to get me to fully stop YouTube yet
I don’t think anyone is proposing an overnight switch. You’ve got to take the long view. That said, I do think when it comes to federated activity pub style projects, Mastodon has gotten off the ground, Lemmy has exploded, pixel-fed seems to be doing pretty good, but the video stuff appears to be a tougher nut to crack.
My gradual migration from YT has resulted in a very fragmented landscape. Many cool vids on Nebula, some on Odysee, but still way too many in YT. Let’s just hope the enshittification of YT speeds up and people respond accordingly by switching to another platform.
At least regarding the enshittification, I’ve started using FreeTube to access all my YouTube content and it has completely negated all enshittification so far. It’s such a great way to watch my subscriptions.
I miss the old days of Youtube where people made stuff for fun or because they were passionate about a topic, before the big Youtubers pushing shit out the door to get as many views as they can.
watch a video from brahkie
People nowadays are greedy. Youtube it is.
Peertube etc need a monetary incentive.
Not really, what it needs is a strong niche community with some reach
Exactly. For any proposed change, it’s going to run up against what I like to call Status Quo Extremism, which is a mindset that suggests that “But that would be different from the status quo” counts as a defeater argument against proposed changes.
The combination of incentives would, as you note, need to be driven by niche interests rather than attempting to reproduce the incentives of the top 0.01% of YouTube creators.
Greedy, yes. But also lots of people believe since long ago that some things on the Internet should be “at no monetary cost” (gratis) It should become common for people to donate money for some things even if it is very little.
As long as trash like mrbeast is watched by so many people, I have no hope that the broad public will use anything like what we want in the near future.
Monetization shifted the focus from niche hobbyist content to gimmicky shit that is tailored to get a bunch of views. When I see a thumbnail of someone with a weird facial expression, it’s my cue to look elsewhere.
Peertube needs a quick and easy way for people to donate:
- tip button (fixed amount with one click)
- donation button (customisable amount)
- subscription option:
- fixed amount per subbed channel
- fixed amount split across subbed channels
- customised amount per subbed channel
- dynamic amount based on viewing time
- mix of all the above
No ads needed.
Production quality will drop, sure. But how youtube spent years in the beginning was from just people wanting to help, people wanting to share stuff, and people wanting some attention, and there’s still massive amounts of those people making videos. A lot more than the people just after hoping to get paid. Then, of course, even most of the people getting paid would do just fine. They’d just operate like Gamers Nexus and actually speak their ads and sell some merchandise. “This video is brought to you by …”
Platform paying you or not, there’s still a lot of money to be made if you get popular.
As far as I know the majority of YouTubers revenue still comes from youtube ads and not sponsorships.
Yeah. Because youtube pays them for ads. If they didn’t, it would all be sponsorships, donations, and merch.
Content creators won’t follow because there isn’t any monetary incentive to do so
Look up Nebula
Does nebula work for small YouTubers? I imagine it would be extremely hard for a small youtuber to get accepted into a platform like that.
My understanding is this: The model of Nebula is basically like a co-op. Everyone gets paid according to the views they get. And the higher Nebula’s total monthly revenue, the more each view is worth.
Yeah I 100% understand and to a large extent agree with this. I think money should be involved , creators should get paid. I don’t think peertube has become “the answer” yet and there is some combination of market level event and technology/feature set that needs to be in place to create enough moment for people to move off YouTube. It will happen eventually ( I think ) but what exist today isn’t enough of a pull to overcome the momentum YouTube has but that doesn’t mean that “we” should give up.
The problem is the next place is a moving target. Enshitification is inevitable, the drive for money will eventually corrupt any good thing we make.
What we need is a platform owned by a public trust or a worker co-op made up of all the streamers. Hopefully roll out some micro direct payment system so you can give the content creators a bigger portion of the donations.
The problem I see with that is that the large streamers who make the platform will most likely hit enshitification in how they run it at some point. I could easily see them getting either power hungry or greedy and rigging the rules to set things in their favor over everyone else.
Unfortunately, video is the most intensive content to host and serve. That’s why these front ends exist, to leverage Google’s storage and bandwidth
Why don’t public libraries host things for the people for free as a public service?
I’m not sure what they accept, but archive.org will host many things.
I found many many old movies video files on archive.org. If you like old movies, it’s a treasure trove.
I want Invidious and Piped to start allowing people to host content just on the third party frontends.
I feel like there needs to be a peered youtube client. As people watching youtube download the videos and later share it with other people who want to watch it. YT will have a much harder time differentiating and actually, it might even help them with bandwidth.
If this were done with IPFS, there would also automatically be backups of the videos, which maybe The Internet Archive (and other archivers) would be happy about.
Interesting idea.
i believe to some degree, that this is what that one youtube alternative did.
Although you could pretty easily implement this into youtube. Would be pretty cool if it was very minimal on the backend, such that people like me could also get involved. I archive yt manually, have TBs of it. Provided read access only to it and having it integrate into a global frontend would be pretty cool.
Manually arriving it sounds like quite the hassle, I throw Tubearchivist out there
it’s not that bad honestly, it allows you to curate everything to whatever needs you have, plus writing a script to automatically archive the more regular shit makes it a lot easier.
Though yeah, you can just use something like tubearchivist.
I run Piped from my homelab, from our home IP. I wonder if they will limit our home too…
Nah, a private instance works fine. Public instances see a lot more traffic and if they use their public IP address for accesing YouTube it is trivial for YT to ban them. If you want to host a public instance, you should use a proxy or VPN for all the YT traffic so yo can easily change the IP address.
I’m having some issues with my private instance that is used solely by myself and not even exposed to the internet.
Mine stopped working.
Today most Invidious instances are experiencing very harsh ip address rate limiting, it is becoming very very hard to watch yt videos through
AFAIK this is not what’s happening this time. YouTube slowly rolled out a change over the past 3 days that requires some sort of app verification for the android yt app. This is affecting Invidious since it emulates the yt android client to fetch video streams. This affects invidious instances hosted privately as well.
The maintainers are aware of this, and are working on ways to solve it. Tools like yt-dlp/newpipe still work because they have working implementations to fetch data by emulating web/iOS/etc clients.
Yeah, I had to update and re patch my revanced app
Was a whole process and a half for me. I ended up finally getting it though.
I’d rather just not watch YouTube if I’d have to watch it with ads through their shitty regular app.
I think it would be cool if invidious had a way of hosting content on its own. You could EEE YouTube
Is there any reason there isn’t a desktop app for this so all traffic comes from my IP only?
Why does it have to be a web server infra?
Use FreeTube?
Looks like its not available in apt
You’re going to have hard time in life, if you only install software through the
aptpackage managerI only install software that is cryptographically signed. Apt is one. Yum is another. F-Droid too. Some tarballs and AppImages are signed.
I won’t use brew or pip or npm or windows store or flat pak or any if these shitty stores that dont do basic security
Compile from source.
Did you open the webpage? There’s a download page with a
.deb. Really isn’t that hard.Is it signed tho?
Doesn’t freetube use Invidious
Try Freetube.
it will download the youtube page and remove trackers and telemetry. but google can still correlate traffic from ip to other identities of yours, I am not sure if by using invidious whereby you download the webpage from the instance and the video feed directly from youtube ( if you are not using proxy option in invidious) is more private than using Freetube and NewPipe which download both the feeds from youtube. only someone from google can tell if they track connexions to youtube “video servers”.
Are you nuts, of course they do! Even at least for security measures, like f.e. breaches.
To hide ones IP of course
I think what you’re looking for is yt-dlp.
Freetube.
Others mentioned Freetube, but note also that you could just host your own Invidious instance on localhost.
Yes but my point was thats very difficult compared to a native app without a web server stack
Seeing issues with Revanced too.
I had this issue yesterday. I upgraded to the latest version of revanced extended and microG. And revanced has been behaving today.
Just tried updating microg, no joy. I also see they removed support for the old Vanced MicroG
I had to delete Vanced microG for revanced to work.
Oh, I never had that problem. Deleted Vanced MicroG and updated Revanced MicroG anyway.
Microg seems to be the issue lately, updating and using the new package put out by revanced fixes it. Afaik microg is dead and not being updated since the vanced stuff, just took this long to become a problem
I think it’s still alive, at least GmsCore had a new release last week
Have you tried using Grayjay?
The only issues it gives me is having to back out of the video and go back in if I stop a video part way into it and screen off my phone, then want to go back to watching again, and that the turn phone to go full screen and turn back the other way to exit full screen responds too danged quickly.
GrayJay is not FOSS
They’d like for you to pay them like $10, but it isn’t mandated. Louis Rossmann is involved with it. The right to repair guy that’s always fixing Apple stuff and trying to get bills passed.
And that doesn’t change the fact it is not foss
That sounds like a terrible user experience. Almost as painful as Symfonium losing my headphones when I pause it.
I hit a back button, open the video back up, and click resume. It’s an inconvenience, but not really that terrible.
Somewhat related… I have aliased yt-dlp with “yt-dlp -4” because my IPv4 address is behind CGNAT which they can’t rate limit without disrupting legit users. When running with IPv6 I always get rate limited or even blocked
I hop between invidious, piped and Freetube regularly. Had some instances when both piped and invidious don’t work at all.
Try Grayjay. It’s worked issue free for months. It’s only bug I’ve noticed is with resuming a video after you pause it and leave the apk.
YouTube itself altered something on their end making it so that invidious does not work. Here is the post about it from their official mastodon page
Thanks. Here is the link as well : https://social.tchncs.de/@invidious/112184892221966052
still going hard on the yt-dlp stuff it into any existing media player backend and call it a day, crowd.
Highly recommend. Works well.
Finding piped instances that are close and working is becoming harder
on android you could try libretube, and there has been a discussion about altneratives to youtube, there is Odysee which is open source and has a some kind of crypto/blockchain thing attached to it. I don’t really understand it all.
That’s why my smarttube in google tv is too slow or doesn’t even load
The end is near
