i absolutely despise youtube. these fuckers are putting ads on paused videos now, and then this.

they will never get better. only worse. we need regulations badly.

Not just invidious, they've just de facto blocked video embedding:

If you're wondering how a viable competitor could arise, other companies needing a video hosting solution that they can rely on to run their storefronts is a perfect use case. This is the Humble Bundle storefront, and they could pretty easily spin up a peertube instance. If that became commonplace, it could be one way for peertube to become ubiquitous.

EDIT: This is related to my VPN I believe, but storefronts still aren't going to be happy if they can't rely on their storefronts working for everyone.

Start asking your favourite content creators to post on PeerTube.

yt-dlp still works.

A spark of hope in a dim world.

You can still watch YouTube without ads using grayjay.app including sponsor block.

Thanks to Louis Rossman

YouTube will not change until people stop using it. And people do not want to put up with the inconvenience of not having a YouTube type service again for the amount of time it would take for YouTube to change or a viable competitor to take their place, it really is that simple.

Are YouTube and Google terrible? For sure, but it only got this way because the only backstop to holding them accountable, the consumer, has proven that they will choose putting up with shitty products and services in the name of convenience 9 times out of 10.

Same reasons that ad tiers are gaining a foothold in streaming services like Netflix. The consumer has shown they are fine with it.

The elites don't want you to know but "[y]ou may be able to get Invidious working on residential IP addresses (like at home)"

Following their guide gives a local Invidious client, don't forget to 1) copy their production compose file instead of using the one on git and 2) change "hmac_key"... from my experience setting up cron (crontab -e) to restart the docker container once per day keeps the Invidious docker healthy

Edit: here are some alternatives for popular Google services. Not in anyway related to the above (smirk

• Google itself: SearXNG (try searx.be first), one of the easiest services to self-host
• Gmail/calendar: a lot of people seem to swear by one of Proton Mail, Tutanota or Mailbox.org. Self-hosting is possible but challenging
• Google Drive: You mean Nextcloud?
• Google maps: Organic Maps is actually getting pretty good now
• Google Chrome: at the very least there is Chromium... obviously there is Firefox and Firefox forks (such as Librewolf), as well as other smaller browsers
• Google Play: F-Droid hosts a lot of FOSS stuff, and there are alternative ways to access Play (such as Aurora Store)
• Android: a bit more difficult... but there is LineageOS, GrapheneOS, and similar stuff

You can block YouTube ads simply by connecting to an Albanian VPN server.

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.

This might explain why mine has been reliable even though it hasn't been updated in months. I guess add me to the list of confirmations that it works on residential connections.

newpiped and freetube will continue to work but piped is also blocked as well

For those who are want something similar to invidious, you can try youtube-local (not my project, I am just a user). It is a minimal python youtube client, and functions similar to other frontends, but runs locally. You lose some amount of privacy (youtube still has a general idea of who is watching with IPs), but it is not very exact, and there is an option to use tor to get the content. You can also enable sponsorblock, or hide yt-shorts.

Sad to hear. Newpipe is still working fine (as of a couple minutes ago) if that helps. That's through a residential IP. I will try yt-dlp from a data center IP when I get a chance. I hope they haven't blocked that.

For Android users, I highly recommend NewPipe as a YouTube client

Self hosted option is a docker image. Probably not difficult to set up.