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I've seen the effects on invidious these past days. 8 in 10 instances have been broken. Google is putting some serious work into shutting alternate frontends down. Shows you how much of a dent they're putting in the bottom line.
this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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Shows you how much of a dent they’re putting in the bottom line.
Or how desperate google execs are to get even the tiniest bump in revenue.
LINE MUST GO UP AT ALL TIMES
hopefully they come up with a workaround.
I doubt it's denting the bottom* line as much as the recent court rulings. And I doubt it's as much paying bills as it is paying vested interests.
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It's about time we try to de-google.
YouTube and my existing Gmail is the only thing tying me back. And the occasional Google maps. I don't even use the rest of their services anymore
THat sounds great! Gmail can be easily replaced, by like Proton mail or something.. Youtube is also very hard.. It's a vicious circle, "Youtubers" try to host their content elsewhere but nobody is looking. While some users also want to get rid of the youtube platform, but since most people are still and keep watching on YouTube, the content creators keep uploading there...
Gmail can be easily replaced, by like Proton mail or something
Except for the fact that you'll need to update your email address in so many places.
If you do move to a different provider, make sure you use your own domain. It's way more professional, and it lets you move to a different provider in the future without having to change your email address again. I've had one of my email addresses for a bit over 20 years across a bunch of different providers.
The paid version of Protonmail lets you have up to 3 custom domains. MXRoute and FastMail let you use your own domain too. MXRoute supports unlimited domains and addresses; you're just limited by total disk space.
If the email address is important to you, it's better to use a paid service since it'll usually give you proper support and an SLA.
+1 for MXroute. I have unlimited domains with 25GB of storage for $30 every 3 years. So less than a dollar per month. Looks like they are still offering it. It's more than enough for email especially considering the Gmail account I used for 15 years was under 5GB.
I switched to them at the beginning of the year so about 9 months ago and have not had any issues.
MXroute are great. I switched to self-hosting my email server using Mailcow a few years ago, but still use MXroute for outbound email (meaning my SMTP server relays outbound email via MXroute). They've got deliverability figured out and have several fallbacks - I think if all of their outbound servers fail to send the email, they retry via Mailbaby and Mailchannels.
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highly reccomend Grayjay and Freetube. Futo claims to be foss but it is only source viewable (my apologies having a brain fart and cannot remember the actual term.) which to my knowledge means you can see the source code but not redistribute it. They ask for a one time $10 payment but the app functions the exact same with or without payment. Grayjay does not have a desktop application but they are looking for someone with experience to develop one. Freetube is open source and contains extra addons like de arrow and watching from invidious instances along with a desktop and mobile application. It's UI is less appealing than Grayjay ( at least personally) but it's the only way I watch youtube on PC now and I use Grayjay on mobile. Both of these contain sponsorblock too! ;)
If you watch YouTube on an android TV you can sideload smart tube TV, which is ad free as well. While I personally don't reccomend it you can sign in with your yt account on both grayjay and smart tube to impket subscriptions.
If you are looking for a solution for YouTube TV... Well... You may need to sail the 7 seas and live with not watching live (unless others have a solution for this.
Fuck Google.
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I've been slowly working on it for the last year or so. It's gone a lot smoother than I thought it would.
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I'm a YouTube creator, part of the partner program, and I also manually upload to TILvids. The videos I make generate about $100-$300 a year through the partner program, so I'm not a professional by any means. It feels like they're trying to keep creators from leaving by putting up small roadblocks that limit our reach beyond the platform. Given PeerTube's non-profit model, I see it as a potential future for content sharing. Though there are a few rock stars on YouTube, most of the creators on that platform make little to no money from publishing videos. There are more people like me than Linus Media Group.
I would guess a significant number of "creators" are motivated by the idea of eventually becoming a hit and making much more money, though. And wouldn't really do it of they didn't have that dream.
Not sure what percentage, though. Maybe less than I think.
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We need to slowdown YouTube and get an alternative that is viable for people and creators. The problem in this case is creators and brands, almost no creators would continue doing videos if there's no money at the end
The problem with money being involved is it's an invitation to spam crap everywhere.
One of my relatives has recently taken up "AI travel videos" and "AI cute videos" as a "hobby". No doubt based on the first thing that came up when I searched for those things, a video titled "make $10,000 a month spamming up YouTube with your AI slop".
Oh, and it needs you to buy the AI slop generating tools that they happen to sell. How convenient!
I mean, this also happened with broadcast TV, where we suddenly went from like 4 channels filled with programs and things competing for space, to 200 channels, where the rush was on to fill the gaps between the adverts as cheaply as possible with reality show tat. And that's all YouTube is now.
The other problem is storage and bandwidth.
It's subscription based, but Nebula is creator owned I believe. Sucks though that everything free gets acquired by some extractive company.
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The other day someone on lemmy kept trying to tell me that if google wanted to shut down ad blocking they would. But they don't, so it's ok.
Lol, spawn me that person plz.
AdBlocking is 100% OK, that part is correct for sure. Ad networks (including Google's) routinely serve up scams and malware: It is foolish not to use a browser with a fully functional ad blocker at this point (i.e. avoid Chrome, use Firefox with uBlock origin).
As for whether Google approves: Fuck Google! They have been serving up malware and scams in their ads. Their opinion should be irrelevant if you have any interest in protecting yourself, they have repeatedly proven they cannot and should not be trusted.
Yes at this point why would any person would care what Google thinks? Google can go fuck themselves.
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Is this the reason why SmartTubeNext keeps breaking on my TV? The updates come pretty quickly but it's getting annoying cause my $1800 OLED has the processing power of a $50 Chinese Android phone and thus takes forever to install updates.
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I'm honestly surprised peertube has lasted as long as it has as it is
It still lasts because there's no easy way YT can offer their own content without the video being available as a file stream (through CDNs at googlevideos subdomains). If they centralize everything to a single, controlled domain (so to allow things as one-time HTTPS request, better session checking and so on), they'd lost the capability of load balancing allowed by the decentralized nature of CDNs. YouTube downloaders (and, by extension, third-party YT frontends such as Invidious) exploit this CDN aspect to download the videos.
It's common to see Invidious instances momentarily blocked. The blockage can't last forever for two reasons: firstly, IPs (especially IPv4) changes due to how ISPs offer IPv4 addresses through CGNAT, so the instance IPv4 (generally domestic servers) will eventually change (often to a completely different IPv4 range) and YouTube won't know that the new IP is a former "offender". Secondly, as IPv4s works through CGNAT, Google can't keep the bans forever because this IPv4 will be eventually rotated to another client from ISP that's completely unrelated and unaware of how their IPv4 was a former address for a downloader. It's like how Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/Facebook/phone-required services can't really keep a permanent ban for a specific prepaid number (especially on countries like Brazil, where ANATEL allows for phone number rotation when the mobile plan is cancelled), because the number will be potentially owned by another person with nothing to do with the former owner.
So, in summary, Google can either end with YouTube CDNs (ditching their load balancing), or they can try to implement an innovative way to keep load balancing while serving the request one-time only, or they won't be able to do nothing but to perpetually catch themselves drying ice cubes.
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That doesn't sound like it's an incredibly difficult problem to solve from a technical standpoint, if the creator is the one being hit. Just need either a software package -- or, if the limitation here is content creator bandwidth, service -- that pushes a video to multiple streaming video providers.
Might be an issue for third-parties creating mirrors of YouTube content, though.
Yep thats whats happening here by the sound of it. TILVids is a very small instance that shares donated $$ with their creators. Its a very good way to try and keep creators on the platform.
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I wonder if these services are on small cloud providers. If so then they can just block their entire CIDR.
I wonder if they were to move to GPC if they would have better luck.
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This can be problematic for Peertube's adoption.
If user only uses Peertube to upload, they likely wouldn't notice a thing from this, but if it's a creator from Youtube that's trying to upload to multiple platforms this can cause major problems for ease of use and since the Peertube user base is small to begin with, this can potentially damage Peertube in the long run.
I've noticed a few people on Reddit taking about getting possibly shadow banned on YouTube, myself included. With no real explanation why? Every video just comes up as "content not available" when logged in. It started a week ago or so. I wonder if this is all related?
I took full advantage of invidious while it was still working, now I am anxious of ever going back to YouTube. It won't be long before they requiring giving them your iris scan before watching a video on that shit platform.
yt-dlp remains unaffected for now.
yt-dlp is only affected when YT changes their algorithms (breaking yt-dlp data scrapping capabilities) or when it's used frequently with the same IP address (leading to automatic IP blockage). If you're using yt-dlp sporadically, it shouldn't be affected.
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