Youtube has fully blocked Invidious

captainkangaroo@discuss.tchncs.de to Free and Open Source Software@beehaw.org – 174 points –
[Bug] "This helps protect our community." · Issue #4734 · iv-org/invidious
github.com
44

Another reason to ditch corporate pages and embrace freedom.

Have they added safety features like denying follows yet?

Also, they really need to create apps for all platforms, this would increase their popularity and usability.

Sadly the amount and variance of videos on peertube pales in comparison to youtube. I need my Sherlock Holmes audio books 😩

Do you know of an instance that is able to cover all their expenses with ads?

I want a peer tube instance with ads because I want to make sure my uploaded data is durable long-term

Why not just pay them? I feel like fedi is based more on that than ads, a lot of us on fedi hate ads.

Because that doesn't sound sustainable

How is it different to other fedi projects/instances surviving off of donations?

Most will likely block the adverts anyway, so I fail to see how it'll make money that way.

I mean, I still block all ads on YouTube, but they still make wayy more money than they need just to pay for the infrastructure. Peer tube would only need to make a fraction of what they make.

Not only invidious I guess, they want the user to login when too many videos has been watched on an IP address. So also web browsers on a VPN for example

This is saddening.

I know the invidious contributors have been working on this over the last few months. Looks like they finally got there only to have youtube slam the door. That's a real gut punch.

I already switched to running an instance at home instead of my VPS, so this news doesn't change much for me personally but it's a demonstration that youtube is actively seeking to block the project.

As with reddit / lemmy, I doubt a viable alternative will emerge until youtube has become well and truly offensive.

As with reddit / lemmy, I doubt a viable alternative will emerge until youtube has become well and truly offensive.

Even after it has this is very unlikely because part of the appeal of youtube is getting paid for work and most people either don't have the money to pay for it, choose not to or hate the platforms through which creators ask to get paid through.

Like it or not, either it'll be another tech company who will later do this exact same thing or we need more people willing to pay and less shitty platforms through which they can do so i.e. not VC backed/supported.

Perhaps. I think consumers are more willing to pay producers than they have been in the past. I acknowledge that the time is not yet right, but with time, the less appealing youtube is the more likely alternatives will become.

There aren't many ways to organize raising the money required to build a better youtube or reddit. You could kickstart it, but you'd better hope whoever does the dev doesn't sell. Another option would be a large open source ngo funding the development, but you're still talking long timelines to completion.

There definitely is room for a more pro-social social media platform that isn't a clone of something else. Paying for it is another matter.

That isn't really what I was talking about, but I understand the confusion.

I meant the people utilising the platform to upload videos etc to get paid.

Youtube is blocking large/public instances of Invidious, not all instances.

Can we please not do the click bait/rage bait thing here?

Bro can't look 1 step ahead...

The point is that the post title was false (or intentionally very misleading, if you insist on creatively parsing it). Accuracy in post titles is important.

Enshittification is progressing....

I'd rather download each video manually via yt-dlp (previously youtube-dl) than creating and using a google acoount to watch it.

Yt-fzf is still an option if you're interested.

Thank you very much!

I just tried it with VLC as player and it tried streaming it, which seems to be blocked. Tgere is a download option, but after downloading, it does not seem to play the video.. Any suggestions?

It's been a long time since I checked the config options but yt-fzf only supports mpv as media player I think.

I was wondering yesterday why no instance was working, because I always share at least one Invidious link together when sharing YouTube links.

BTW it's not fully blocked, if you can install Invidious locally and use it. But that's not a route I want to go.

What does "fully" mean? I'm watching Dan fucking Rath going on a hilarious rant rn on jing.

According to one of the maintainers

YouTube/Google has patched the latest workaround that we had in order to restore the video playback functionality.

Right now we have no other solutions/fixes. You may be able to get Invidious working on residential IP addresses (like at home) but on datacenter IP addresses Invidious won't work anymore.

Some instances will continue for a bit, but it's probably a matter of time, or until invidious figures out another method

I run invidious at home on my proxmox server. The server is available everywhere with tailscale, so I can use it even when travelling. If Google ever blocks this, nobody at home can watch youtube anymore...

Freetube still seems to work . . .

Freetube just loads the videos from YouTube directly if you don't activate the proxy option (which will use Invidious or Piped, haven't used Freetube in a while so idk which one it was)

Brave Browser blocks YT ads seamlessly.

Lots of options available. YT is slowly cracking down on them. That's OK, just keep your medium run media consumption plans flexible.

What's the traffic on invidious? Like, while I don't necessarily agree with the ad-block-block, the profit motive makes sense given their ubiquity. But are there really enough users of alternate YouTube frontends that Google is capturing any meaningful profit? Especially when developer hours are expensive and could be used elsewhere on more valuable projects?

Honestly, dev hours are probably a pittance compared to the potential revenue of more ads watched and/or additional YT prem subscriptions.

I feel it's just a side effect of them trying to block ai companies stealing large amounts of videos for training models. They see too many downloads from a datacenter IP address and require user login to continue

Openai's whisper often recognizes mangled words as "please like and subscribe" so they're actively stealing videos and their subs (the manually created ones by companies like "caption+ by js", which creators paid hundreds of dollars to make, not the free ones made by Google automatic transcriber or whisper itself) to improve their models so they can make profit

"Stealing"

Stealing, without the quotation marks. If you copy something and profit off it without crediting, compensating or asking permission to who paid for it, it's stealing. We can't downplay it as "but they just downloaded 700k hours of videos and 200k pirated books for training a simple model that they're charging users $20 a month, what's the issue"

If you copy something for personal enjoyment without profiting from it, then it's not stealing.

I get your point, it's just hard to give a shit when one amoral megacorp takes some profit away from another. Google owns and profits from YouTube videos and occasionally throws a few pennies to the creators if they haven't broken this week's selection of ever-changing arbitrary rules.

Probably Google just wants to block them not because they care about the creators but because it's costing them bandwidth money.

From the new agreement that they had with warner bros for creating closed captions, it looks like Google is also stealing the subs for training, they had direct access

It just sucks that someone pays hundreds of dollars to have a human create subs for a show, then that is used without credit or permission for training a model (actually whisper accidentally credits moments of silence with the name of the subbing groups used for training)