Stepping away from open source | Hacker News Reader

Stepping away from open source

omar.yt

76 pointsvuldin33 comments

"Invidious is an alternative front-end to YouTube" - TIL. Running an open source project can be exhausting, and a thankless task, almost all of the time. An active community and user-base helps, but it seems like omarroth has come to the end of the road.

As the maintainer of a relatively large OSS platform (OpenFaaS), I also wrote up about this last year too. For anyone who can't relate to omarroth's statement, it might help with perspective: https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-leadership/

You are an absolute machine of a human and a wonder to behold. Keep being awesome.

Note that https://invidio.us is not the only instance, just the most popular one. You can host your own, or use one of the others:

https://instances.invidio.us

Repository at https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

It's written in Crystal.

For anyone unfamiliar, Invidious is just Youtube without ads and it lets you turn the screen off on mobile. It also lets you turn videos to an "audio only" mode for speed/bandwidth.

It's a viable alternative to Spotify IMO as one use.

It's basically free Youtube Red. Really sad to hear this, hope the creator is better off for it though.

It's also the only way I know to have RSS feeds for youtube channels. I hope other instances won't follow invidio.us, that would be a major loss for me. I could run my own instance of course, but then, running an instance to generate a RSS feed to consume it would feel overkilled, better to run a scrapper from cron directly.

Anyway, Invidious was an extremely useful tool, thanks to the author for making it.

YouTube channels do have their own feeds, but there's no obvious way to get to them.

If it's a small channel, you can just copy the channel ID. Visit their YouTube channel, look at the URL, and construct your URL like this:

    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID

If it's a larger channel, then the channel ID will be replaced by custom string and you'll have to look at the page source to find the channel ID.

You can also export all of your channels as OPML, which is actually documented (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6224202?hl=en) and upload it to your RSS reader.

Oh, nice. That certainly saves a lot of trouble in my case, thanks a lot :)

> It's a viable alternative to Spotify IMO as one use.

Indeed. I've been using it to play background music for D&D, no more annoying adds.

I may well wind up hosting an instance following this.

Sounds like a neat way to use Youtube without being tracked by Google analytics. I guess that's the next project I will try to run on my Raspberry Pi :)

YouTube tracks you regardless, if I understand correctly. For instance, if you search on DuckDuckGo and there's a YouTube video in the results, you can play it right there. However, DuckDuckGo warns you that you'll be tracked.

I love that Invidious doesn't have an algorithm that changes your recommendations based on what you've watched. It's so freeing.

Here is the github issue thread: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/1320

Hopefully the community will pick it up and continue development. Projects like invidious, nitter and bibliogram have turned clicking youtube, twitter and instagram links into something I actively avoid (especially twitter which for which some thing's always gone wrong and I have to refresh) to being a joy to browse again.

I hadn't heard of invidious before, and it's not clear what it is when visiting Invidio.us. so for others that are curious:

https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

> Invidious is an alternative front-end to YouTube

Invidious is such a treasure and something I do not want to see go by the wayside. I would like to think, for whoever is available to work on the project with the time in energy, there could be enough support to keep this going via donations.

There have been other alternatives in the past and there will be other alternatives in the future. I've found the most reliable option is to run my own and not rely on someone else's service which can break at any time and disappear at any time.

Interfacing with YouTube in any unofficial way is fraught with peril by its very nature because YouTube is always trying to stop it.

I'm glad that we have the option to self-host, and would be curious to learn more if you have other self-hosted youtube frontend options. As it stands now I think if invidious isn't maintained it will likely break soon. Newpipe breaks every other week and it's actively maintained.

Invidious I found to be uniquely and particularly convenient because, for a while at least, it ran like any other website and I could skip the steps needed to self host.

There's also this which includes a frontend:

https://github.com/Athlon1600/youtube-downloader

I'm unaffiliated but I like to follow this particular project when I want to know if others are having the same trouble with YouTube when things break for me. I only ever implemented a backend myself when I chose to self host.

I'm gonna reconsider using Athlon1600/youtube-downloader in my projects but from what I remember of benchmarks I did about 8 months ago my fork of youtubedown was faster like obtain a video url in 300ms faster. In my projects I lazy load the video on demand when the user pushes play instead of preloading video at page load so minimizing the time to obtain a video url matters to me.

I think the original title, “Stepping away from open source,” works better here.

What struck me is this:

> I can't help shake the feeling that somewhere, the software I use is being developed solely by volunteers who would rather quit, but don't have the ability to say "no".

I've witnessed a number of developers similarly burn out in the last years. This suggest either the opensource movement attracts people prone to such burn-outs or that it produces them. The general reaction tends to be a bit of sympathy mixed with a hard-nosed "Well, it's difficult. Some make it, some don't" attitude. Yet given the trend we seem to ignore a fundamental flaw in how we're working, interacting, consuming, supporting, and rewarding one another. Even Shuttleworth cited a kind of opensource community fatigue when he killed off the phone project. It disappoints me to think that the opensource world talks a lot about freedom at the same time we have Omar's suggestion that those working in it really are not free.

This is a risk of volunteerism in general. I think this is why you often see age gaps in organizations. You have a lot of young people who can’t pace themselves, and 3/4 of those who decide to stick around are gone in 2 years. I suspect that it’s a small but not insignificant contribution to young people moving somewhere else and starting over. I just need a change of pace...

Someone just a couple years ago wrote up an opinion piece in which they asserted that the standard oath for volunteers should be “I promise not to burn out”.

Im sad to see invideo.us go, I was a casual user and loved the simplicity of it. But the reality is that open source goodwill projects have a cost in resources and free cannot really survive as free in the long term, whoever is maintaining the software has a life and bills.

Can someone explain what this did? I visited the site but it just seems to be a random collection of videos.

It's an alternative front end for YouTube. A rather nice one at that.

Any chance of donating the domain to the community? I think we can take care of hosting :(

The main instances are so unreliable that I just run my own.

I have never had problems with the instance from https://snopyta.org.

They seem to host a lot of other services as well, such as searx, nitter and bibliogram. I mainly use their searx instance and it is my primary search provider.

They also have hidden .onion instances iirc.

Oh that's a shame.

> The API will continue to function until October 1st, to give time for any services relying on it to migrate to other solutions.

Aw no. I was thinking about using invidio.us in my own projects but now I guess I won't!

I have need of a YouTube streaming server, backend only, which I can embed on a web page. I made my own with youtubedown and bash but maintaining it is a pain since YouTube is always changing ciphers and also I forked youtubedown which means I need to adapt my changes to new versions when I upgrade.

So I was thinking of ditching my own and adopting an existing service. Trouble is existing services tend to stop existing. I made my own YouTube streaming server in the first place because I was using HMA YouTube proxy which was always breaking.

So this is a great reminder to me to keep maintaining my own YouTube streaming server.

[I'm using a different VPN today! Is it IP banned?! I don't know. Will this comment be [dead] on arrival?? I don't know!!]

There are many alternative instances, that's the great thing about projects like invidious.

https://instances.invidio.us

For your own projects, I would recommend relying on multiple instances anyway because if one has downtime you could just use another one.

Yes except the whole invidious project is rapidly being abandoned according to discussion on GitHub. The next breaking change in YouTube could break invidious forever if the project is unmaintained.

I just need to remember not to be lazy and to continue maintaining my fork of youtubedown. The only obstacle for me is I really don't use YouTube frequently so mostly it's a matter of remembering to do the necessary maintenance.

Why did you decide to fork youtubedown?

I forked youtubedown because it has too many features. I don't want to download any files and I don't want to mux DASH formats. All I want is a script that prints the 360p video url as fast as possible. And JWZ broke support for premuxed video which I added back. And JWZ broke support for requesting a specific cipher which I added back. Basically youtubedown development went in a direction which diverged from my use case.

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