this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
247 points (100.0% liked)

Privacy Guides

16754 readers
1 users here now

In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.

This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.


You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:

Learn more...


Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!

Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!


This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.


Moderation Rules:

  1. We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
  2. This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
  3. No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
  4. Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
  5. Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
  6. Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
  7. News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
  8. Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
  9. No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
  10. No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
  11. Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
  12. General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.

Additional Resources:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

So I created an open-source Lemmy bot to reply to posts/comments with YouTube links with converted Piped links to preserve your privacy.

Piped is an open-source alternative privacy-friendly frontend to YouTube. You can watch the same content from YouTube without connecting to Google's servers.

You can find the source code at: https://github.com/TeamPiped/lemmy-piped-link-bot

You can find Piped's source code at: https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped

PS: I'm the author of Piped :P

top 21 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (4 children)

That's neat, but anyone using Piped on a regular basis should probably look into something like LibRedirect for their browser to redirect every YouTube link to Piped regardless of where they encounter them.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

To add on to this tip, for anyone who is reluctant to or cannot install an extension on their browser, you can copy and paste the YouTube link into the search bar of your favorite Piped instance and hit Enter.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Thanks for this. I had just been manually replacing the youtube.com part of the URL to my favourite Piped instance. The breadth of the addon is great.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Thnk you so very much for that recommendation!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Good suggestion, thanks!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Omg I've wanted something like piped for so long!! Thanks for letting me know about it!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

You're welcome! Now, anyone who creates a post/comment with a YouTube link will know about it too :)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

PS: I’m the author of Piped :P

Thank you so much OP!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is the bot currently online looking for new YouTube links all over Lemmy, or do we need to start up our own if we're interested in using this in a community?

Just wondering as I couldn't see a readme on the repo to find out.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You can now try sending it a message mentioning communities in the format [[email protected]](/c/[email protected]) and it will try joining it :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You can find more information at https://feddit.rocks/comment/39147, it tries to look all over Lemmy, but doesn't have enough communities to scan :/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you @[email protected]! Thank you for piped and the bot. It is now activated on [email protected].

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Good to hear that :) Inviting the bot definitely helps it reach more communities, so thanks for that!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What is the difference between piped and invidious?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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:

  • Subscriptions don't necessarily require an account
  • Playlists don't necessarily require an account
  • Piped supports Infinite scrolling
  • Piped supports Webm videos
  • Piped can stream videos from Odysee if the same video is available there.
  • Piped is a lot lighter on the server
  • Piped always proxies your traffic to Google's servers (most Invidious servers don't proxy videos to YouTube by default)
  • Piped has SponsorBlock integrated (DeArrow will be added soon)
  • Piped has ReturnYouTubeDislike support via RYD-Proxy
  • Piped can only be self-hosted on a server. Invidious on the other hand can work fine on local networks.
  • Piped is a lot easier to administer than Invidious as an instance operator.

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 :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thank you so much for your work!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Wow, that's nice! Looking forward to give it a try later today.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I love Piped. I use it so much every day. I just wanted to thank you for creating and maintaining the project. It’s huge.

Also, this bot is going to be great for me on iOS because access to extensions on safari are really limited.

Thanks Kavin!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Questions:

Is Piped something that you have to self host

Are there instances out there that this redirects to or a single server?

Is it a sort of P2P thing where different servers host different videos or parts of different videos?

How will this be affected by Youtube cracking down on adblockers?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is Piped something that you have to self host

No, you don't have to self-host it. You have a large number of public instances hosted generously by people! You may want to however self-host it however if you don't live close to an instance, or want to actually own your own data.

Are there instances out there that this redirects to or a single server?

You can switch instances directly from the preferences page. You don't need to change your URL for switching instances.

Is it a sort of P2P thing where different servers host different videos or parts of different videos?

No, Piped has no P2P aspects at all. What you describe is technically infeasible/difficult since we don't store videos at all, just proxying them.

How will this be affected by Youtube cracking down on adblockers?

Time will tell, so far we aren't affected. But, we could be affected when it fully rolls out rather than as an A/B test.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the reply. I'll definitely have to check it out.

load more comments
view more: next ›