this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
178 points (98.4% liked)

Privacy

34425 readers
888 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
178
Why is there only one invidious instance left? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
32 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Did the others all decide to quit or is there a practical reason?

top 32 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 148 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (3 children)

YouTube has been cracking down on alternative frontends.

Vanilla Invidious currently doesn't work well,
so most hosters paused and/or gave up.

Fijxu runs a fork of Invidious,
with their own modifications implemented to circumvent the blocks,
here's the source code if you're interested:
https://git.nadeko.net/Fijxu/invidious

I've got big respect for Fijxu,
he's been doing a very good job of keeping Invidious alive + fighting against the YouTube crackdown lately, basically all on his own.

If you can please consider:

All the above can help Fijxu,
since currently he's mostly fighting a big tech giant all on his own.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think the best thing to do is selfhosting your own instance :/ piped is doing a great job with their script to install with docker ! Yes I know this takes away the privacy feature allowing google to get your public IP and other annoying metadata... However all the rest works as expected !

It has some quirks right now though... But they are very close in solving the issue (already done with LibreTube ).

[–] Randomgal 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

If it takes away the privacy, why do it at all?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

No sponsors, no ads, customizable and watch YouTube videos without a premium account?

Edit1: Lighter UI

Edit2: There's a way to use a VPN and split tunneling but didn't dug that far right now. So it's still possible to have the privacy feature if that's against your threat model/privacy concerns.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 17 hours ago

And lighter UI. Pretty important for when you're on a system with limited ram, like the steam deck.

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

its just the ip, you can use a vpn

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

Or use nadeko's onion service

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 days ago

Vanilla Invidious currently doesn't work well, so most hosters paused and/or gave up.

This is the reason why I stopped to host my own. It's so painful to maintain

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

thats great ressources thank you!

[–] hellfire103 49 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Because Google are dicks.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

Google rate limits IPs which breaks YouTube for many users who use shared IPs to protect themselves, including invidious users

[–] [email protected] 67 points 2 days ago (3 children)

Google started blocking them in some way. Even my self-hosted, entirely local-access only instance stopped working.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It got so bad that couldn’t access YouTube on their official app in my company phone without logging in.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Stop using company phones for personal use. Wtf are you thinking

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

Even YT on browser for both my tablet and laptop have gotten mad at me and thrown a hissy for forcing me to login. Less of a problem on my Laptop, because I use Freetube to watch on there, and on my Phone I use Revanced. But man, I just hate watching on my Kindle now, because that shit is old and can barely run Firefox (got it via aurora store, not even in the Amazon appstore 😭) and YT on browser is ass. I tried NewPipe and it crashed all the time, so I got the for PipePipe cause I'm a weeabo, and it worked well but now I get the blocked IP every other day. My tablet crashed when I tried to download Revanced YT on there, so I gave up.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Did you run the token generator thing? Worked for me a couple days ago (but not over a VPN).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I haven't, no.

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

Shit for privacy, but that should fix it

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

That works for me, for a while. I also auto-restart the invidious container stack hourly, per their recommendation. But sooner or later it fails, and usually the fix is to recreate a token. It only takes a minute, but it's a hassle to do often.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Best thing you can do is host it yourself, and keep it private. Doing this has helped with preventing with IPs getting blocked.

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

That's what I did. Used a random sbc I had laying around, put on invidious with docker and run. Works. Age restricted videos are an issue though.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago (1 children)

There is also nyc1.iv.ggtyler.dev But I don’t know where I found it.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago

Tyler themselves has several instances, including hosting other alternative frontends.

Check them out here.

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

Apart of Invidious, also FreeTube, which works with Invidious, don't work well anymore, it listed the searched Videos, but they are not playable. As workarround I set the SMplayer as extern player, so I can watch the Videos, clicking on the little icon down left of the Video Thumbnail, or open the Video direct in the "Open URL" of the SMplayer. This still works fine, also with the URLs from a lot of other streaming sites. SMplayer is the Graphic interface of the Mplayer. Anyway, Google is killing all front-ends which cut of the Video ads. I think, there is a need to search an alternative to YT (maybe Odysee?)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago

You can dig deep for instances not on the list but this isn't recommended