Invidious – An open source alternative front-end to YouTube | Hacker News Reader

Invidious – An open source alternative front-end to YouTube

invidious.io

353 pointspanki27183 comments

There is a great list of many alternative frontends I found here: https://github.com/mendel5/alternative-front-ends

They work well for internet archiving too, e.g. when Twitter or Reddit are being annoying and showing popups/login redirects/etc. you can replace the URL with an alternative frontend version and archive the content without the cruft.

Thank you! This is great.

See also farside [0], which maintains a list of functional instances of alternate frontends, and can redirect links to a working instance automatically.

[0] https://sr.ht/~benbusby/farside/

Interesting, from the doc[1]: "Because of various issues Invidious must be restarted often, at least once a day, ideally every hour."

[1] https://docs.invidious.io/installation/#post-install-configu...

I guess it's related to this issue, a memory leak (or probably multiple): https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/1438

Also interesting that the issue is almost 3 years old and mentions even older reports.

Getting invidious to run was a gigantic pain for me. It definitely consumed all my RAM and crashed my system at least once.

Odd, I have the docker image running on a cheap 4gb VPS and it's been rock solid so far (set it up about a week ago).

It was definitely a pain in the ass before the official docker image. Have you tried that?

Thank you! I'll try the Docker image.

No problem. And I meant to mention the Docker Compose config they have here [0]. This is what I use to self-host on my Raspberry Pi, and it works great. Just make sure to add a cron job that restarts the container every hour to get around the memory leak issue (my cron job is literally /bin/docker restart <container_name>)

[0] https://docs.invidious.io/installation/#docker

As long as you aren’t hosting a public instance, the docker config in their docs should work fine. As for RAM consumption, I have set limits, so not sure if it’s actually happening.

You mean when compiling? It's normal.

There are recommendations about the memory needed for compiling.

If you do not have enough RAM just use the docker image which is already precompiled.

I don't observe this. Invidious was super easy to setup (docker-compose.yml) and I never restart. Has worked flawlessly since 2 years.

Huh, could be that the doc is outdated then. Thanks for the info, maybe I'll give it a try after all!

I verified and I did not see a drop in memory consumption after `docker compose down`. Added this to the issue you mentioned.

A selfhosted instance of this, combined with Yattee https://github.com/yattee/yattee as a client on iOS and tvOS is a pretty decent way to consume YT subscriptions with minimal exposure to algorithm and ads.

YT has a popup now (adblocker detected) that gets past UBO.

the parent comment had no reference to ubo? invidous doesn’t use the youtube ui or account

> minimal exposure to algorithm and ads

Was commenting about that

...yes? but the parent comment had no reference to ubo?

There isn't as of now, I think with or without the quick fixes filter.

Invidious and piped do not require an ad blocker and do not use an ad blocker

I'm a little surprised Google doesn't bake all the ads directly into the stream at this point, making it extremely difficult to separate them.

Extremely difficult? No. SponsorBlock already removes in-stream ads. If things get more complicated, ML will be employed. It's an arms race but so far things seem to be on our side. Long-term, I don't know.

They could just block buffering this video until the time of the ad is finished on serverside, as they know how long the ad is.

You still can block ads but you must wait if you see a black window or an ad stream.

We can just buffer manually and wait. It's an unsolvable problem without DRM, and even then...

This whole approach would massively increase the cost of distribution due to how CDN networks scale.

A silent black screen would still be a win. Ads are disinformation.

Yep, I'm tired of fighting the arms race with twitch ads, so I just mute the video now and do something else for a few minutes.

I would honestly be perfectly happy with a black screen for 30 seconds as a compromise to ads. I only leave the twitch webpage because the visuals bother me almost just as much as hearing the stupid sales pitch or the goofy "lol we're so cheeky and random" jokes made non-stop by insurance company ads.

I'd rather a silent black screen than an ad.

I can't understand people using SponsorBlock. Basically you want people creating videos for free?

Me watching a sponsor segment isn't going to make any money for the video creator. They're being paid by the sponsor to place the segment in their video; there's no way for the sponsor to track who watches it. The segment is just a waste of my time.

This is separate from YouTube itself tracking who watches the video, and for how long (and if they skip any), and if they watch any ads, and then giving a bit of money to the creator for the ad views.

Yes, but if SponsorBlock or any other solution like that starts to become popular, sponsors will stop paying creators.

Like it or not, the whole way "free" services on the internet work with ad-blocking, and always have, is that the people blocking ads are taking advantage of technological measures to avoid them, so that the actual cost of serving content is paid (by ad-viewing time) by all the suckers who don't know how to block ads, or don't want to for some reason. It's basically like that with sponsor segments, though here I think it's more like a television or newspaper ad: the sponsor is simply hoping enough people will watch the segment and go buy their stuff (since it's personally recommended by the content creator!!) to make their sponsorship investment worthwhile.

How is it fair for creators to take my premium money AND force me to watch sponsor segments? That's double dipping. YouTube should have a system for marking segments so premium users don't have to watch those segments. Premium users pay with premium money and free users pay by watching YouTube ads + sponsor segments. Fair in my book

So, don't? Nobody is forcing you to do anything. Just don't watch or don't pay premium. Jeez, since when does the world owe you anything?

The only way SponsorBlock will become popular is if a huge fraction of YouTube users switch to 3rd-party clients. I have a really hard time seeing that happening; that would be like most Mac and Windows users all switching to Linux.

I just uninstalled the Youtube app. Now I use the website on my phone, and Sponsorblock works without issue.

Why do I need the app for anyway?

If I understand you correctly, you're using YouTube in a browser on your phone. SponsorBlock only works on your phone because you've installed an "app": a browser extension that implements it within the browser.

Most people don't do this.

More people ought to do this. It's the best way right now to defeat spurious decisions by platforms. Reddit's app is off my phone. I use its terrible website, so I don't go there anymore. Youtube has a good website, and until they enshittify it, it's the best way to experience Youtube on a phone.

I totally agree: using the website (through Firefox + uBo) is generally the best way, because the user has the most control. A proprietary app doesn't give you this.

Is this true? I'm not sure if sponsors ask for this but I think metrics are available to creators to show how many people watch during different portions of the video, so they could, including post-payment based on the results.

See audienceWatchRatio under https://developers.google.com/youtube/analytics/metrics

Example: "A one-minute video is watched 100 times. Half of the viewers stop watching after 15 seconds and the rest watch the entire video. None of the viewers watch any parts of the video more than once. In this case, this metric's value would be 1 for time buckets in the first quarter of the video, and its value would be 0.50 for the remainder of the video."

So someone could ask for ratios before, after, and during the ad segment to see if it's worth sponsoring them again. On average they can tell how many people skip the segment, how many stop watching entirely, etc. You can also see this on the UI where it shows peaks above the timeline with other users clicking past sponsored content.

There are more than 2 options

Amusingly, a person could pay for YouTube Premium (thereby, allegedly, giving the creators more money) and still use sponsorblock to block the double-dipped inline ads.

Most people I watch on YouTube are either not sponsored or on Nebula, so I just watch there instead.

Sponsorblock doesn't take away sponsorship money from creators. Sponsors have no way of knowing how many people use sponsorblock. Oh I also pay for premium. So the creators get their cake and I eat ad-free content. Win win

People don't come to YouTube for ads/integrations. When I click on the video, I only want the actual content. Ad segments aren't the only way to monetize anyway.

> Basically you want people creating videos for free?

Noone "wants" anything here. It's just more convenient.

The end game isn’t embedded stream, it’s attestation

I've heard things along these lines, but always as an aside. Can you expand on this?

Like, YouTube would only work in a browser environment which has been approved by Google? and which has promised not to be running in headless mode? And which promises to have validated that there is at least one authentic retina looking at the screen?

What is a reasonable end game situation to be working on countermeasures for, and what is tinfoil haberdashery?

https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/27/google_web_environmen...

The end game here is to simply turn all personal computing devices into locked down ecosystems that the user has no real control over, basically what iOS already is (and Android isn't too far off from).

All code being executed on the device, from the bootloader all the way to the browser or youtube app, must be approved by the manufacturer, with an opaque black box security chip inside the device verifying that this is true and providing a signed message as proof that has to be sent to Youtube servers before videos are served. This completely eliminates the issue of both adblockers and third-party frontends.

After that, impression tracking just needs to start covering some of that gap of air between your brain and the screen. Let's throw in some attention-detecting cameras so you can't skip the ads by looking away from them.

They'll let you skip commercials, but not without shouting the brand name.

https://www.techradar.com/news/sony-patent-would-have-you-ye...

They'll use ChatGPT (in spoken-audio form, with speech recognition) and you'll have to tell the agent what the ad was for, and why the product is so great, to prove you watched it and really understood the marketing message.

What mute buttons were made for.

Drink the verification can.

I suppose I should expect my phone to start refusing to run gcc at some point then?

Since ads are personalised, this would produce a new stream per view which would come with a computational overhead. The stream would have to be rendered on the spot and not in advance, which puts further pressure on compute resources during peak times. That would decrease margins, maybe so much it isn't feasible at all.

(Disclaimer: I don't know that much about video codecs or editing.) I'm surprised they don't just break the video at key frames and insert the ads that way. From my little use of open-source video editing tools, it seems like this is pretty low-CPU to do, and if (like YouTube) you don't care about a good user experience and are happy to just insert ads at seemingly-random places instead of between natural breaks in the program (as with TV shows), it should work.

You are probably right, eg Losslesscut in Linux does exactly that: no transcoding, no overlays nor any editing other than cutting and moving around sequences from the same video. Editing and exporting such videos is blazingly fast.

Adding a bit technical context (for readers) to your comment on inserting ads at "random places": many codecs use the concept of an initial frame [1] which would place technical restrictions on where the ad could be inserted. If Youtube believes that ad timing is too important, they might not accept technical restrictions on the timing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_compression_picture_type...

Creators can mark specific sections in the video where they want an ad to play. I assume this dynamism also plays a contributing role.

YouTube reencodes uploaded videos, so YouTube controls where the keyframes are at playback time.

> and if (like YouTube) you don't care about a good user experience

Other than ads, which is the business model and keeps the content flowing... does YouTube not care about UX? I generally find the UX pretty good. I can always watch a video near-instantly, on nearly every device I own, search is astonishingly good even when my Apple TV mis-hears my searches, and it's one of the biggest video streaming sites in the world.

As a user I think the UX overall is pretty great. Sure there are things I'd tweak, but I can see reasons for them.

Removing downvotes?

Randomly rewarding the latest 'feature' so you get a load of shorts of videos you've already seen, random votes for things, etc.

I've never used the voting. It's a quality signal and they are notoriously difficult to get right. Netflix infamously switched from stars to like/dislike and everyone hated it, and yet it provides better signal and recommendations become better and therefore you get better content surfaced that you'll enjoy more. I'd guess a similar thing happened with YouTube.

Zooming out there's typically an ecosystem benefit, because otherwise why would they do it. That ecosystem benefit isn't always about money, if no one watched videos there would be no business. In fact a business that is often much better than a business with no users that isn't, so user happiness and experience tends to be prioritised highly in products/companies like this.

A video with 1000 upvotes and 1 downvotes tells me something

A video with 1000 upvotes and 2000 downvotes tells me something.

A video with 1000 upvotes doesn't tell me anything.

I can still downvote, I just don't get told the downvote total.

If they decided the system was broken and decided to replace it, I could understand. But they haven't changed the system, they've just removed the utility it did have.

You’re right about the YouTube too, they also started with rating videos x/5 stars

>does YouTube not care about UX? I generally find the UX pretty good

You think it's "pretty good" when a video is interrupted at some random point in time (usually while someone is mid-word) to play some annoying video at a much, much louder volume than the video? That is not what I consider a "good user experience" at all.

You can chain MP4 containers without re-rendering anything. It's extremely quick and computationally inexpensive. Of course at such a scale it might still cost a lot in the absolute sense, but I'm pretty sure it would be balanced by the increased revenue

I understand Youtube uses a variety of codecs and encoding parameters to serve videos to a multitude of platforms and clients. Maybe there are restrictions on some clients that force Youtube to pick a codec for them which makes ad embedding unprofitable. Circumventing embedded videos would then be as trivial as faking a particular client signature.

They could certainly prepare a stream for every video with inline ads that's used as a fall back when personalised ads won't load. Certainly showing a non-targeted ad is better than showing no ad, right?

If you make the generic ads worse than personalized ads (show more, show them more frequently, or just get the most annoying ads) you'll actually get people opting into personalized ads as the lesser of 2 evils.

I would be very surprised if this isn't either in progress or done and just waiting for the right opportunity to roll it out.

Aren't Ads dependent on cookies, location, search history etc., such as it is, so remain flown in?

Simple: no benefit to serving ads you can’t count. YT doesn’t care about serving ads, they care about ad revenue.

What is about embedding ads within the primary video stream itself that suggests they would not be countable?

I host my own instance and it’s pretty great. With a disabled home page feed, I don’t get distracted with random “popular” crap. I only seek our videos that I need and it has reduced my YouTube consumption considerably.

Hilariously, YT has disabled the homepage feed if you have search history disabled. They think this will make people turn search history on… So now I always come to a nice clean homepage before I go looking for through my subscriptions.

That is hilarious because it first happened way back when GDPR was in the news, to me at least, I opted out because why not. Sure enough a lot of features stopped working. But here's the funny part, they came back! And from then until just a a month ago I've had my search history "disabled" but all those features working. Then suddenly a month ago they told me yet again that I have to enable search history and this time they disabled all the same shit.

This is amazing. Thank you for that. I love the clean look of my empty homepage!

How exactly are creators paid for their creations from this "ethically designed" front end?

Patreon and the like are the hest ways.

donations and sponsors, as usual

Oh you mean the 99% of “creators” flooding YouTube with repetitive and ai-generated crap content to leverage ad revenue “ethically”? They can go pound sand as far as I’m concerned.

There is great content in YouTube for sure but let’s face it, 99% is garbage designed to 1) latch on to popular trends to get more views and 2) use that to show ads and generate revenue for what’s essentially no content at all - just random garbage.

It's not productive to say that 99% of the people contributing content are making garbage. Even if that were true, the 1% of good creators are equally affected by a lack of ad revenue as the bad ones.

The parent comment is basically pointing out that you're depriving the creators you watch of ad revenue. If you sponsor the creators you watch directly, that's great! But most people don't, and even for the people on HN I suspect that they watch a lot more different channels than just the ones they sponsor.

These people are willing to contort themselves into a pretzel to justify getting something for nothing. They’re no different than people that show up to a restaurant, get an hours worth of good service from a waiter then tip them nothing (in the US) and claim they believe tipping is morally wrong and the system should be brought down. “No dude, you’re just a cheap bastard.”

Weird obsession around here with avoiding ads. We're talking what, 5-20 seconds every few videos? You barely have to "watch" them. If it's inconveniencing your life too much maybe you're consuming too much YouTube. It's all passive consume consume consume. Think we should be talking about YouTube addiction more.

I'm assuming they are referring to the other 1%. Presumably ones they follow/subscribe to.

Is it not safe to assume we're not watching the 99% of videos?

Advertising is a terrible business model with many negative externalities up to threatening democracy. The sooner we get rid of it the sooner we'll have a viable and ethical alternative.

Given the value of the average ad impression, a micropayment system that charged cents to each user is all you need. The problem at the moment is that while advertising is "good enough" there's little market pressure for publishers/creators to align on a common micropayments system.

YouTube offers an alternative model: YouTube premium.

I still get ads for obviously awful products at the start of some videos. Neither YouTube Premium nor adblocks can stop a creator from telling me about the latest monthly razor subscription for me to buy.

That's not an alternative to the described micropayments system since this is an expensive bundle that doesn't depend on usage, so almost the opposite

Correct, it's an alternative to the advertising model, which is what it was a response to.

Well, they could do what Kurzgesagt does: sell merchandise. They have some really nice posters.

The same way most 'career' creators make their money these days, channel memberships, merch, superchats, sponsors, patreons etc.

YouTube has already made it pretty risky for creators to stake their livelihood on advertisement money, as YouTube can decide to demonetize videos and channels pretty much arbitrarily with no quick recourse (which is important given how front-loaded video view rate is) if a recourse is available at all, and companies can steal a large chunk of advertising revenue even for content that should fall under fair use. On top of that, YouTube can also put ads on videos even if creators haven't set them up, in which case the money does not go to the creators.

As such it hasn't been worth it for creators to rely solely on advertising revenue or YouTube premium revenue for a while. YouTube, through its total disregard for creators, has long since made it not a stable source of income in the way that the others can be.

Do you not notice all the "This video is sponsored by" segments in videos these days?

Is this legal?

In Google's Terms and Conditions, it's says that bypassing ads violates Youtube's terms and conditions. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14129599?hl=en#:~:....

Nope! The real question is who cares or is willing to do something about it.

It is legal, Invidious hasn't signed that agreement and doesn't use YouTube's API.

They got a legal letter from YouTube[0] to which they responded publicly.

> "They don't understand that we never agreed to any of their TOS/policies, they don't understand that we don't use their API."

[0] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/3872

Isn't using the website kind of like using an API?

They refer to the registration-gated "Developer API"

I'm not sure.

IANAL, but reading the developer policy, reference is made to include the Youtube Developer Site & Services, but is not exclusive of other Youtube API Services.

Whether Invidious uses a Public Developer API, a Broker offering their own API, or a workaround with an internal API seems inconsequential.

https://developers.google.com/youtube/terms/developer-polici...

    #  Client: `"API Client" means a website or software application (including a mobile application) developed by you that accesses or uses the YouTube API Services.`

    #  Service: "YouTube API Services" means (i) the YouTube API services (e.g., YouTube Data API service and YouTube Reporting API service) made available by YouTube including those YouTube API services made available on the YouTube Developer Site (as defined below), (ii) documentation, information, materials, sample code and software (including any human-readable programming instructions) relating to YouTube API services that are made available on https://developers.google.com/youtube or by YouTube, (iii) data, content (including audiovisual content) and information provided to API Clients (as defined above) through the YouTube API services (the "API Data"), and (iv) the credentials assigned to you and your API Client(s) by YouTube or Google."

I'm not sure how I feel about software that sits on this grey line of legality sitting on the front page of HN.

There's still the fact that a contract requires affirmative acceptance. The Invidious devs, as we have seen, have not accepted it.

no. the user-agent might, but there is no transient agreement

End users can be sued or blocked.

Just because something is written in terms and conditions, does not mean it is the word of God (or courts).

More generally, do you have to legally agree to Terms and Conditions to communicate with service provider's servers over HTTPS? Do you legally agree to them after you communicate one packet in such a way?

I don't think when Google crawls various websites, that Google has to agree to various licenses those website owners may have, or that its crawling of them implies such agreement.

It's ridiculous to believe that a magazine publisher, or a TV provider can require users to watch or hear the ads. Real life shows many people intentionally don't, using various methods, and I see no reason why Youtube provider should be different in this.

> More generally, do you have to legally agree to Terms and Conditions to communicate with service provider's servers over HTTPS? Do you legally agree to them after you communicate one packet in such a way?

Browsewrap agreements (agreeing by using the site) are pretty much unenforceable to your point. I'm not sure this is the same thing however.

Youtube don't offer a customer facing consumable service for offering an ad free experience outside of Premium or their Developer API. The app is deliberately bypassing the provided services. Bypassing those published mechanisms is hacking, and depending on where you are, may not be legal. I suspect for most consumers of HN, this would be the case.

Browser crawlers fall under fair use. I'm not sure this does.

I get it. I don't like ads either.

> Youtube don't offer a customer facing consumable service for offering an ad free experience outside of Premium or their Developer API. The app is deliberately bypassing the provided services. Bypassing those published mechanisms is hacking, and depending on where you are, may not be legal. I suspect for most consumers of HN, this would be the case.

IANAL, but it seems like if it worked like that then adblockers in general would be legal, so I'm going to assume that it doesn't work like that.

Can you explain what you mean? Adblockers are not illegal afaik.

Right, that's my point; from my amateur perspective, if it was illegal to grab YT videos without displaying ads, then it would be equally illegal to, say, show a blog post while not displaying the ads it tried to include. And since ad blockers are, AIUI, completely legal, it would seem to follow that it's also legal to download YT videos and play them without playing ads. (Of course, IANAL so maybe there's some angle I'm missing)

Just call this a specialised browser

Yep, those are corner stones to interoperability with noscript/basic (x)html browsers, which should be supported by the actual web sites in a best effort scenario (and should be mandatory for tons of administrative online services or core online services).

But many toxic coders working there are actively making their "web interface" ultra hard dependent on running javascript code in the client, for instance with extremely volatile and complex web browser fingerprinting. For instance, the new kick.com which will "javascript check your web browser", and you better have a Big Tech web engine... Don't be fooled on where the real evil is...

Interoperability of Big Tech with Small Tech is prime. Only hardcore regulation can do it and it must expect the worst: Big Tech shadow-hiring hacker teams to give hell to Big Tech alternatives.

It's a pity it's now hard to find an instance which allows downloads, it was nice to be able to grab things on mobile.

I use side-loaded 4K Video Downloader: https://www.4kdownload.com/products/videodownloaderandroid-4.... Not a regular viewing client though.

This looks promising, thank you.

edit: If I end up trying this out it will have to be on a separate user profile because of the permissions.

Are you guys not super sketched out by that website? Self-hosted (and unavailable on f-droid) download (why not just use NewPipe at this point?), vague About Us page, duplicated and almost certainly fake "positive reviews" left by different outlets, etc.

Personally, i just install termux and yt-dlp. Admittedly, i am on a rooted device, but i think some additional tooling is available to give termux access to the shared user storage area.

I got sketched out when I took a closer look at it. I forgot NewPipe existed to be quite frank, it makes much more sense for me to use it instead of the linked app.

NewPipe still works.

Because bandwidth is not cheap and there are better tools for downloading.

Either youtube-dl or newpipe.

Little aside, it’s yt-dlp now. It’s still awesome.

Another aside: youtube-dl still exists, since yt-dlp was forked from it. youtube-dl isn't that awesome, so you should use yt-dlp. It's similar to OpenOffice.org vs. LibreOffice or XFree86 vs X.org: the old one is still there, but it sucks.

NewPipe works perfectly fine for downloading videos.

https://newpipe.net/

It doesn't seem to do 4K video on my Pixel 6a - I'm only getting up to 1080p downloads.

On Android, you can use Seal[1] to download YT videos locally. It also supports many other sites.

[1] https://github.com/JunkFood02/Seal

I’ve been seeing Crystal pop up more and more lately, I want to dive back into that again.

Yeah, me too. I was checking out the Lucky framework the other day. At least on paper, it looks impressive.

I just love the domain name of this Invidious powered website https://yewtu.be.

Belgians to the rescue (tm)

I wonder if someone will make a browser extension that swaps out the video tag on youtube.com and replaces it with an Invidious (or other YT frontend) instance stream for the same video. You'd get an ad-free experience on YouTube without users needing to learn a new site. The added benefit is that the extension could load balance between different front ends and remove/add ones without the user changing anything.

There are multiple Firefox’s extensions redirecting Youtube to alternative frontends, including with embedded videos. Some are even balancing automatically.

Specifically, here's an extension that does just that and more (FF and Chromium): https://libredirect.github.io/

How does this work?

I just installed, then uninstalled, the Chrome (Brave) extension that is supposed to redirect videos to some invidious instance.

I use Brave and am now seeing the "sorry you can't watch YouTube" anymore sign because Brave blocks ads.

I thought installing the extension from the website would just redirect whatever video I clicked on to the mirrored video on an Invidious instance, is that not the case?

I'll have to go try this out again. Lately I've just been relying on Feedbin to let me watch subscribed channel videos (quite a nice experience actually), but that misses out on a number of features which I might be able to get from this.

Invidious can also provide RSS feeds, so you can keep using your RSS-based workflow with it.

This is cool but I never could figure out why it was named like an Imperial Star Destroyer.

adjective

(of an action or situation) likely to arouse or incur resentment or anger in others. "she'd put herself in an invidious position" synonyms: unpleasant undesirable ungrateful

Pretty apt name, considering what the software does.

TIL that invidious is an actual English word.

I always suspected that it was video related pun, something like "in-videos".

The fact that the word also contains "vid" probably has something to do with why they picked that word for the project name, in addition to the actual meaning of the word.

>why it was named like an Imperial Star Destroyer

What's wrong with that? The world would be better IMO if more software projects had names fitting of the ships of the Galactic Imperial Navy.

Say what you want about the Empire's treatment of the many worlds under its control, but they're really good at things like naming ships as well as having good-looking starships and uniforms.

I wonder if my iPad 3 story with YouTube¹ can be fixed here, with this service

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37700283

You can try, invidious support old devices.

Why are there no alternative front ends to Instagram? I know there was one previously that shut down but no more have popped up.

I think the main difference is youtube gives you access to nearly everything without a login while instagram does not.

Having said that there are some web pages allowing you to browse "public" instagram accounts outside of the instagram page but I guess they rely on tons of short lived bot accounts.

There was Barinsta which Meta DMCA'd down and threatened to sue its developer if Barinsta is not removed and discontinued. As is always the case, the developer got scared, had complied and these news spread across the community, so now there might be less developers who dare to publish an alternative, even less to put a lot of work into something that will be rewarded with threats and lawsuits. The reason why there's no alternative to Instagram is corporate arrogance. That is a common phenomenon at corporate giants like Meta.

How exactly does this work? I guess it's not just showing embedded players for video. Is it scraping comments?

Can I have high-availability and load balance support so that I can virtually host them over a Kubernetes cluster?

There is an helm chart: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/tree/master/kubernetes

Why would I use this over YoutubeDL hosted on a low power device like a NUC or Raspberry PI?

Invidious is a web frontend. YoutubeDL is a downloader. So I don't really see what your question is getting at.

Does Invidious in Firefox allow more than 720p? Seems I cant get any higher resolution.

You gave me doubt, I just checked and 1080p is available on Firefox in my private Invidious instance.

You need to enable the DASH format in the settings if it isn't already, I think.

AFAIK you have to select DASH as your preferred video quality (or append &quality=dash) for other resolutions to work. It's not enabled by default because the server has to proxy the video (CORS):

https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/177#issuecomment-...

Thanks, pruned my list to instances that allow DASH.

Great way to watch YouTube at school when the main site is blocked btw

Anyone to help porting it to WASM?

i’ve been using this for over a year, and it’s honestly really amazing.

The tech industry failed the invidious team and other projects like this. This should be 100% legal and allowed based on a right-to-mod precedent but not lawyer is willing to take it that far because this is open source.

This project gives control back to the user. It shouldn't be a grey zone and it shouldn't put maintainers at risk to work on it.

Till this issue is resolved, OSS projects like this are unsustainable.

Some evil megacorp is already carpet bombing maintainers with C&Ds and there is ZERO help for this.

"Some evil megacorp is already carpet bombing maintainers with C&Ds and there is ZERO help for this."

Is it possible or realistic for a code host to not care about US copyright laws and for developers to contribute anonymously?

It’s certainly possible, but going down that path sounds like a good way to end up like Aaron Schwartz.

I don't really see how. I think it's more like a good way to end up like Dmitry Sklyarov.

In that case, the software developer dropped charges because the circumvention wasn't available in the US. That was lucky for Dmitry, because they might have still won civil damages even if he was not charged criminally. Would Google drop the case? I'm not convinced they have any reason to. I wouldn't take the risk. But, I'm not a lawyer. Regardless, this clearly is available in the US, and provides circumvention to US users via an Iceland (EU) server. This is not similar to Dmitry's case.

It is and some projects do it already, it's just that 99% of developers don't have the necessary knowledge to do it properly or don't even care (until they do)

I.e. set up your own git server + web frontend, get a domain name from "DMCA-ignoring" registrar, same with hosting, pay with Monero etc.

...or they know all of this but are reluctant to proceed for some irrational reason, along the lines of "they will get me anyway", "it doesn't matter" and so on

It isn't about copyright laws. These megacorps send the MAINTAINERS THEMSELVES C&Ds based on their TOS - why? Because OSS devs do not have the means to pay for a potentially unlimited defense.

I think it's possible to support open source projects and not support the idea that you should be able to pirate content by bypassing the monetization effort of the host and content creators.

If Google wanted people to pay to watch their videos, then they shouldn’t make them available to stream without paying.

I have the right to skip whatever content I don’t want to watch. That’s not piracy and frankly it’s ridiculous to suggest that it is.

I guess you think the Mute button on TV remote controls shouldn't exist too, right?

Ads horribly downgrade the experience of watching videos.

Then pay for premium.

uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock already removes 100% of ads on native YouTube.

At some point, we should learn to upload our videos elsewhere.

https://joinpeertube.org/en

yes! However youtube got stuck with a lot great videos. Unless someone form IPFS or torrent community are already secretively archiving youtube videos. Then youtube video random view key will just serve as an index for videos for a globally archived videos (the video can also sit on owner's hard drive) (kinda like what archive.org is doing for web page). Then someone can write a plugin to republish the video to peertube, web torrent, odyssey all the other alternative video sharing sites. This shall at least to start take people's dependancy off of youtube/alphabet/google platform/infrastructure.

No doubt there are people doing that for awhile now.

Peertube allows you to mirror a Youtube channel so, at the very least, creators could already create a Peertube mirror of their own content with very few effort.

Peertube also allows to proeminently display a configurable "support" button to redirect viewers to your patreon/liberapay/paypal or whatever.

The only reason to not mirror your content to peertube? Because you want people to watch Youtube ads.

But, as this news show us, nobody want to watch the ads.

PS: I’m surprized peertube is not more famous so I posted it independently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37906699

While I agree in principle, I think the harsh reality is that hosting video content is a much heavier lift than text. I don't have confidence that a decentralized video platform really any legs atm. Being wrong about this would be a pleasant surprise.

Stuff like individuous is better positioned to start mixing youtube content with videos from decentralized hosting. But I don't think anyone has committed to doing that. I'm sure google would not like it either. I know Freetube has already committed to not being interested in this. I'll be on the lookout for a fork.

I've been off YouTube for a few days and missed the new ad blocker news until coming to this thread. Now I'm like... `sigh` I guess it's time YouTube had it's mastodon moment...

But indeed Video is a different (heavier) beast than text. I would assume a less perverse set of incentives that a federated platform offers would get rid of 99+% of the "content" that Youtube currently hosts, but the remaining 1% would still generate traffic many times bigger than mastodon I'd think.

Using Kagi, I set up a domain redirect to point youtube.com search results to an Invidious instance. Works great.

It’s fine but at least try with the ui. It’s like they spent 2 min on it.

No, please, the UI is one of the best things about it. I can run YouTube on my 20-year-old iMac G4 (PowerPC G4 processor, 1GB of RAM) and it ... just works. Most other sites fail completely - Gmail Basic HTML view and Hacker News being two notable exceptions.

Can your 20 year old Mac even decode high definition H.264/5 videos?

I personally don’t understand the desire to have an ugly tool just because it’s minimal. You can have minimal and not have it be ugly.

Truly built by engineers

I mean, it's open source. Don't like it? You can fork it and create something better.

Sure, but if you want people to use it, you could also just spend an additional day to make it look decent instead of expecting a fork to do it.

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