EDIT: For those who are too lazy to click the link, this is what it says

Hello,

Sad news for everyone. YouTube/Google has patched the latest workaround that we had in order to restore the video playback functionality.

Right now we have no other solutions/fixes. You may be able to get Invidious working on residential IP addresses (like at home) but on datacenter IP addresses Invidious won’t work anymore.

If you are interested to install Invidious at home, we remind you that we have a guide for that here: https://docs.invidious.io/installation/..

This is not the death of this project. We will still try to find new solutions, but this might take time, months probably.

I have updated the public instance list in order to reflect on the working public instances: https://instances.invidious.io. Please don’t abuse them since the number is really low.

Feel free to discuss this politely on Matrix or IRC.

  •  net00   ( @net00@lemm.ee ) 
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    362 months ago

    Title is kinda misleading. The issue only affects public instances, and it has been an ongoing problem since many months ago. Basically the moment youtube detects lots of traffic from one IP it gets blocked, and need sign-in.

    It seems this block just became harder to work around, and they started blocking all IPs from hosting providers, but I’m sure a solution will be found eventually.

    If you have a spare laptop/PC/raspberry pi you can host your own invidious in your home. It won’t get blocked, it will be much faster, and you can use options that are usually disabled on public instances (the API and DASH quality).

    Then you can add something like tailscale/twingate into the mix to access it outside your home. Self hosted wireguard can also work if your ISP gives you a static IP or you setup a DDNS service. I personally use twingate because I don’t like opening any port in my router.

    •  ironsoap   ( @ironsoap@lemmy.one ) 
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      102 months ago

      I appreciate the cogent context and solution oriented post.

      I’d also say though that from a privacy standpoint self-hosting invidious is still allowing GeoIP info to be attached to downloaded videos, which is a fingerprint which can be used by data mining. Admittedly rather abstract as in this case the primary point of deplatforming might just be to de-ad, or give better video control, etc, and not obfuscate for privacy sake.

      As I said though great points!

      •  Pup Biru   ( @pupbiru@aussie.zone ) 
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        2 months ago

        i feel like this makes it on par with eg newpipe right? since newpipe doesn’t have a server, so all requests are direct to youtube

        people seem to be okay with the fingerprint trade-off… and a vpn (as in, an external vpn that invidious routes all traffic through) would help with that

        •  ironsoap   ( @ironsoap@lemmy.one ) 
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          42 months ago

          Exactly true in the newpipe comparison. Same with YT-dlp variants.

          I’m an always on VPN sort of guy, but most are not. So yes the fingerprint tradeoff is one I accept within my ability to deal with inconvenience. Mostly upside at this point with no ads, just sponsors that slip through sponsor block.

          My fingerprint it’s perfect, but I know it’s working as I can see other peoples feeds are more adaptive and directed then whatever I get. I know I have a hole when I see something spammy too.

          https://coveryourtracks.eff.org/ always worth a check.

  • Not going to be a popular opinion but that doesn’t surprise me at all, almost certainly breaks their tos.

    I think people should focus more on stuff like peertube that doesn’t just piggyback off another service against said service provider’s wishes

    • Sure, I agree, but at the end of the day it’s useful to be able to search and watch YouTube videos so long as it’s a popular platform because it still has by far the bulk of topics covered.

      • You can do that through their own interface though, there are browser extensions to do all the things invidious did anyway

        Not like going to the website will cause your computer to blow up or something, if privacy is the concern there are plenty of ways to anonymise it

  • Need to use alternatives to YouTube and move the creators to, YouTube is shitting on our face day after day, and the problem is that we can’t hide ourselves to access them since they are blocking Tor and datacenters adresses… Good luck!

  • It was expected since it makes sense to cut off users that don’t generate any revenue. YouTube has now became like Instagram or Facebook where you have to make an account to view anything on their platform

    • Never. Even if yt blocks the program from downloading from its site, it can still pull from like 10,000 other sites. I doubt google could do anything to actually stop the software from being distributed. We all know how that goes.

      It is a very useful piece of software. I’ve never used it to actually download a youtube video.

    • yt-dlp now suffers from the same issue that Invidious does: uncircumventable rate-limiting based on IP address.

      You may be able to get Invidious working on residential IP addresses (like at home) but on datacenter IP addresses Invidious won’t work anymore.

      Same for yt-dlp, currently: It works from your residential IP address, but not a datacenter IP address like a VPN.

      If you get Sign in to confirm that you’re not a bot or This helps protect our community. in yt-dlp, do not actually try to sign in, because that will get your account banned (see yt-dlp/yt-dlp#10128).

      So once a solution is found for Invidious, yt-dlp will be able use it too, and vice versa.