YouTube is severely rate limiting Invidious instances

FriendBesto , 2 months ago

For FYI:

Install Freetube

Install LibRedirect on FF.

On settings point it to send YT links to Freetube.

I used Tab Wrangler to auto close tabs, so this will close tabs that are created after whatever time when pushing YT links, I have that set to a minute.

I am lazy and use KDEConnect, to my PC connected TV to send links. Like a remote.

Push links from any client, I use NewPipe. As it also has my channel subscriptions.

Enjoy, until Indivious is fixed. Could use other services but Freetube is pretty good and fast. Takes your own subscriptions too. Pipe like some others use JS, which I avoid and you have a lot of control over Freetube. This is easy to revert once everything his working.

lud , 2 months ago

If that is the case then adoption should be easier.

lemmyreader , 2 months ago

yt-dlp FTW! https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/yt-dlp#Faster_downloads

kandoh , 2 months ago

The end is near

aPirate , 2 months ago

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
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/cd757ca2-bcc5-4225-a846-8afb93f6e0fb.jpeg

lemmyreader , 2 months ago

Thanks. Here is the link as well : https://social.tchncs.de/@invidious/112184892221966052

s08nlql9 , 2 months ago

That's why my smarttube in google tv is too slow or doesn't even load

KillingTimeItself , 2 months ago

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.

possiblylinux127 , 2 months ago

Finding piped instances that are close and working is becoming harder

net00 , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

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.

lud , 2 months ago

Yeah, I had to update and re patch my revanced app

Zahille7 , 2 months ago

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.

possiblylinux127 , 2 months ago

I think it would be cool if invidious had a way of hosting content on its own. You could EEE YouTube

onlinepersona , 2 months ago

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.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

lemmyreader , 2 months ago

Interesting idea.

KillingTimeItself , 2 months ago

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.

spechter , 2 months ago

Manually arriving it sounds like quite the hassle, I throw Tubearchivist out there

KillingTimeItself , 2 months ago

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.

fiend_unpleasant , 2 months ago

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.

delirious_owl , 2 months ago

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?

byte1000 , 2 months ago

Use FreeTube?

delirious_owl , 2 months ago

Looks like its not available in apt

onlinepersona , 2 months ago

Did you open the webpage? There's a download page with a .deb. Really isn't that hard.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

delirious_owl , 2 months ago

Is it signed tho?

moreeni , 2 months ago

You're going to have hard time in life, if you only install software through the apt package manager

delirious_owl , 2 months ago

I 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

some_guy , 2 months ago

Compile from source.

possiblylinux127 , 2 months ago

Doesn't freetube use Invidious

anticurrent OP , 2 months ago

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".

nigga , 2 months ago

Are you nuts, of course they do! Even at least for security measures, like f.e. breaches.

Undertaker , 2 months ago

To hide ones IP of course

MonkderZweite , 2 months ago

I think what you're looking for is yt-dlp.

divergent_hierarchy , 2 months ago

Others mentioned Freetube, but note also that you could just host your own Invidious instance on localhost.

delirious_owl , 2 months ago

Yes but my point was thats very difficult compared to a native app without a web server stack

FriendBesto , 2 months ago

Freetube.

ProfessorYakkington , 2 months ago

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.

cm0002 , 2 months ago

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

Ultragigagigantic , 2 months ago

Why don't public libraries host things for the people for free as a public service?

kbal , 2 months ago

I'm not sure what they accept, but archive.org will host many things.

ExtremeDullard , 2 months ago

I found many many old movies video files on archive.org. If you like old movies, it's a treasure trove.

anticurrent OP , 2 months ago

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.

SnotFlickerman , 2 months ago

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.

GravitySpoiled , 2 months ago

People nowadays are greedy. Youtube it is.

Peertube etc need a monetary incentive.

Gabu , 2 months ago

Not really, what it needs is a strong niche community with some reach

abbenm , 2 months ago

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.

lemmyreader , 2 months ago

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.

GravitySpoiled , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

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.

Zerthax , 2 months ago

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.

Prunebutt , 2 months ago

Compare the production values of channels like e.g. philosophy tube and old AVGNs. Times have changed.

Hamartiogonic , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Philosophy Tube is available on Nebula. I think that place is a viable alternative to YT if you’re mainly watching educational stuff.

Alk , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

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.

Hamartiogonic , 2 months ago

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.

Alk , 2 months ago

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.

Hamartiogonic , 2 months ago

That solves some of the problems, so I’ll count that as a step toward. However, the people who make the videos can suddenly be ignored by the algorithm or their channel can suddenly be deleted without a warning.

As a member of the audience, I’m frequently annoyed by the quality of the search results. They clearly serve YT more than they serve me.

abbenm , 2 months ago

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.

Zerthax , 2 months ago

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.

pyre , 2 months ago

watch a video from brahkie

WamGams , 2 months ago

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.

SnotFlickerman , 2 months ago

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.

WamGams , 2 months ago

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.

SnotFlickerman , 2 months ago

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?

WamGams , 2 months ago

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

abbenm , 2 months ago

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.

ColeSloth , 2 months ago

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.

lud , 2 months ago

As far as I know the majority of YouTubers revenue still comes from youtube ads and not sponsorships.

ColeSloth , 2 months ago

Yeah. Because youtube pays them for ads. If they didn't, it would all be sponsorships, donations, and merch.

ProfessorYakkington , 2 months ago

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.

onlinepersona , 2 months ago

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.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

bionicjoey , 2 months ago

Content creators won't follow because there isn't any monetary incentive to do so

Look up Nebula

lud , 2 months ago

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.

bionicjoey , 2 months ago

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.

Ultragigagigantic , 2 months ago

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.

AceFuzzLord , 2 months ago

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.

possiblylinux127 , 2 months ago

I want Invidious and Piped to start allowing people to host content just on the third party frontends.

minimalfootprint , 2 months ago

I hop between invidious, piped and Freetube regularly. Had some instances when both piped and invidious don't work at all.

ColeSloth , 2 months ago

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.

ugjka , 2 months ago

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