Hi, author of the Piped link bot here! I think this is meme great feedback to throw light on some issues on the experience with the bot. 😂 I'll open an issue at https://github.com/TeamPiped/lemmy-piped-link-bot to track this later.
Author of Piped (and also a member of TeamNewPipe and LibreTube) here.
I haven't seen any changes from YouTube recently, the ways we fetch age restricted content still seem to work for most videos. However, this method may not work for all videos as YouTube has different levels of age restrictions afaict. I've seen very few videos fall under that category personally.
If anything were to change in the future, I may consider implementing something similar to what this extension does (or use their API) in Piped.
Author of Piped here.
I think it is quite unlikely for YouTube to implement a DRM for watching videos. In anyways, we will keep fighting collaboratively as long as we can.
The most likely way YouTube probably will affect us currently is if they decide to log in wall their platform like how Twitter did.
Peertube is based on the Activitypub protocol and can federate with other instances just like Lemmy/Mastodon. Odysee is a decentralized blockchain-based video-sharing platform.
If you'd like to monetize your content, Odysee would be the better option due to its own cryptocurrency for tipping. I personally like Peertube more, as I think it is better moderated against right-wing content.
Piped can be more privacy friendly in a few cases, as you don't need an account for subscriptions or playlists.
Here are some differences to Invidious:
I'll conclude by saying that I was once an Invidious user. I decided to write Piped at a time when Invidious was riddled with extremely odd bugs and performance issues. Some of these issues still persist to this day. I've always kept performance a top priority in Piped. I wanted to create a better alternative to YouTube than Invidious for my use case and threat model. I think I have succeeded in that :)
Unfortunately, yes since for views to be counted, we have to make some tracking requests to YouTube.
Piped uses the Odysee sync API to find YouTube content already available there, and if so stream it from there. This is also written in the readme on the GitHub :)
You can just change the hostname, for example, youtube.com to piped.video. Alternatively, you could just use something like Libredirect to automatically do it on your browser.
I don't think the current Lemmy clients allow hiding bots, but if they really bother you/people that much, it should possible to add options to hide bots altogether.
I currently host the official instance, which is entirely run by donations. However, there are many community instances people can switch to in the preferences menu on the site. They are listed at https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/wiki/Instances
Here's some that I thought about: