It’s a lot of maintenance. I’m not knocking it, I’m just pointing out how difficult it is.
I hosted a pixelfed server for my city and it cost a few hundred bucks out of my own pocket. It was a test run so I can push my city to move their social media to open-source.
But the constant need to apply spam protection and abuse from visitors, not to mention abuse from users like copyright shit and even CSAM. My expensive side project became a full time job.
I’m hosting it in my own network. I access it. no one else!!
And I’m doing it, so I can tell you: It’s almost no effort hosting Invidious locally for yourself. It just works. And if YouTube breaks something every 2 months, you can usually “docker compose pull; docker compose down; docker compose up” and it works again.
Just in case it is not clear: Invidious is an alternative YouTube frontend. In the backend, it uses YouTube. It’s not some kind of Fediverse thing. You cannot upload videos with it / on it and you can be the only user ever using it.
Any non-youtube link to watch this? Don’t want to deal with Google no more
https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
For tech people: You can host Invidious locally… No google, no ads, no popups.
It’s a lot of maintenance. I’m not knocking it, I’m just pointing out how difficult it is.
I hosted a pixelfed server for my city and it cost a few hundred bucks out of my own pocket. It was a test run so I can push my city to move their social media to open-source.
But the constant need to apply spam protection and abuse from visitors, not to mention abuse from users like copyright shit and even CSAM. My expensive side project became a full time job.
Locally!!!
I’m hosting it in my own network. I access it. no one else!!
And I’m doing it, so I can tell you: It’s almost no effort hosting Invidious locally for yourself. It just works. And if YouTube breaks something every 2 months, you can usually “docker compose pull; docker compose down; docker compose up” and it works again.
Just in case it is not clear: Invidious is an alternative YouTube frontend. In the backend, it uses YouTube. It’s not some kind of Fediverse thing. You cannot upload videos with it / on it and you can be the only user ever using it.
https://github.com/iv-org/invidious
Conclusion: low effort to host locally.