YouTube is severely rate limiting Invidious instances

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.
- 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
- 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.
- Content creators won't follow because there isn't any monetary incentive to do so
  Look up Nebula
- 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.
- Why don't public libraries host things for the people for free as a public service?
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.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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

- 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

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.

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?
- Doesn't freetube use Invidious
- Looks like its not available in apt
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.
I think what you're looking for is yt-dlp.
To hide ones IP of course
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

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

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
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
- That sounds like a terrible user experience. Almost as painful as Symfonium losing my headphones when I pause it.

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.

The end is near

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

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.

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