I operate an invidious instance. Google has really cracked down the past two weeks on YouTube front ends. Its extremely frustrating.
Invidious devs are finalizing a workaround so hopefully things will be working again in the next week or two.
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
93 points (94.3% liked)
Privacy
32424 readers
308 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Seems to be a big crackdown lately. Freetube and Grayjay are the only apps that seem to consistently work.
Grayjay is proprietary, so I don't think it is very good for privacy and freedom
Newpipe appears to be working
FreeTube also doesn't work well
The advantage of FreeTube is that if it doesn't work, it can use an Invidious instance as a fallback.
Invidious doesn't work now lol
I've noticed Invidious instances having trouble recently as well. I'm sure they're not dead though, just need to get the next mouse for the endless cat and mouse game.
You can usually find an invidious instance if you look through redirect.invidious.io. For example, if I try the servers for https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=aQsWzL7_RiI the 6th one down currently works.
Yeah I usually just follow the "try another instance" links until one works.
Seen the same thing. You have to hop around to get high quality
Same thing I've noticed with invidious instances lately. My clipious on Android is broken more often than not. Freetube still seems solid although I think they each use different apis.
google has been blocking any IP that uses lots of youtube bandwidth, and that means any public instance needs to do IP rotation.
I also heard they began blocking all IPs belonging to some cloud providers.
I run my own invidious instance from my home servr. Only I use it, so it'll never be blocked, but I don't have the same anonymity as if using a public instance...
It's mostly for the benefits of using youtube ad-free without a google account, while having local bookmarks, watch-later, and subscription feed. If that's your main goal Invidious is really easy to set-up.
My main fear of running it on my home server is they will block my IP address and my entire household can't use Google products anymore.
Oh, the horror! /s
Imagine having to explain to a casual user, SO, sibling or parent that you, while fighting to preserve your anonymity, google blocked the house. xD
Same discussion from 4 days ago with the link to the respective Github issue: https://lemmy.ml/post/18936433
Sometimes you can find an instance that works but you have to go through a lot of them and it may only work for a few minutes or even less. Invidious doesn't work at all for me. I hope they find a workaround because I already started committing a very serious crime against my freedom by visiting youtube.com
NewPipe is broken for me. When I go to try to open the videos in my mobile browser, YouTube gives me the same error. So, YouTube itself is pretty much bricked to me on mobile, since I refuse to register an account.
I'm unsure if the behavior would persist if I disabled my VPN, but fuck that.
Same for me. Started watching youtube videos in firefox with ublock origin, works perfectly fine.
On a side note, Smart Youtube for Android tv still works perfectly fine.
I have had the same issue. For me the last few weeks I keep changing VPN servers due to them being blocked.
Yup. I've had the same issue with invidious. Hope it'll get fixed soon. Freetube works for now.
Now I've tried almost all of them in the Piped instances list (Several domain name for sale and server not found errors) and only the smnz.de one works for me. :( I am wondering whether a freshly installed self-hosted private Piped video instance will work fine.
If you're looking for an ad-free client that still works right now; In the 6 years I've been using YouTube (re)vanced on android, I've only had it fail to play videos for 1 single day around 6 months ago. That was fixed within 24hrs.
Not quite the same as a full custom instance/frontend like piped; but it'll do the job while you wait for updates.
That's not really privacy friendly, right? I don't exactly know how it patches the apk and what it changes but it doesn't remove trackers. Correct me if I'm wrong
Ah, I should have double checked the community.... Got here from /all.
No, it's not explicitly privacy friendly. It's mainly focused on a wide variety of optional UX changes, returning several paywalled features like PIP/Background playback, and removing advertising as well as providing sponsor block.
You could use instance on my VPS it's not blocked yet. However it's http only :/
Why you can't just issue Let's Encrypt certificate via certbot?
I don't know configuring cert always feels scary to me even though it's probably not that difficult
I am looking for Piped instance for LibreTube, but this is better than nothing. Than you!
The instances list is not up to date :
- List of instances : https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/wiki/Instances But after trying maybe more than 10 of them I found one which manages to play a video :
https://piped.smnz.de/watch?v=bBhDWTZDH9c
There's probably more working instances.
Plan B : I guess running your own Piped instance and not sharing it with a lot of people could be worth considering.
Personally I'm sticking to https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Yt-dlp#Faster_downloads for the video downloading I do.
Same error on smnz.de
Works for me still (Using Tor browser. I'm Europe located).
In LibreTube doesn't work
Indeed. I tried on mobile with LibreTube and with Mull and both fail. And also fails now in Tor browser. The list is getting shorter.
It happens once in a while. I would continue moving instances or using over services.
Google is actively attacking so it takes time to come up with a defense. In the end Google is just making us stronger. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger after all.
Same problem here is there any other solutions for iOS?
I started using grayjay and although it still gets blocked sometimes restarting the app usually works
I dont know if can help but if you search the direct server to a specific instance maybe can jump the problem. For example: lunar.icu instance can work if you search piped.lunar.icu or kavin.rocks instance by piped.kavin.rocks. Sometimes if the instance work can be useful
Frontend doesn't matter. And I am watching videos primarily via LibreTube Android app