Google seems to be blocking API access for Piped video servers

Noooooooooo! The poor google 😢

their $412,378/s has been reduced to $412,367/s! 😭 😭

They’re making plenty of profit selling all of our data  and getting ad revenue from the 95%+ of other users who aren’t blocking them.

If youtube fixed their content ID system and stopped falsely demonitizing all the creators I watch then I would hapily pay for youtube red (or whatever they call it now). As it is though I'm not giving them my money just for them to pay copyright trolls with some of it. I'd rather give my money to noone than risk having some of it go to the people leaching off the completely broken content ID system.

YouTube should be public infrastructure.

How many people are using Piped, revanced, or the like? I doubt it is the majority. This move is highly likely more greed than anything.

Does Google care about our user experience? The short answer is no. Look at the intrusive ads, how long they are, them suggesting DRM, right wing pipeline, and more.

Look at how they treat their content creators. Demonetization, channel and copyright strikes, etc.

The list goes on. Youtube should and needs to be public. Internet is a utility and needed to survive by everyone. A video hosting service like Youtube is needed as well. Through every perspectice, Google is, ultimately, wrong in doing this.

This is c/privacy. Are you really advocating for pouring money on the company (Google) that's doing everything it can to get to know everyone and use the information for showing deceiving ads, among other things? Or the company that supports false political propaganda? (In the form of paid advertisements). Support your creators, thats a very good thing, but for the love of god please do not fund this data mining machine.

Leave us nerds an opening. The 99% that can't figure out how to put in an adblocker should be able to cover us nicely.

I would pay if

1. Google promised not collect any data but now you would pay and have your data collected.
2. I just want load my subscription feed and they are all there not hidden away.
3. Hid shorts or have them on separate tab.
4. Bonus would be if related videos where acutely related videos in time span. Not the mess they are now.

Also why would I have to pay YouTube music? I don’t want that.

I would pay if they let me without compromising my anonymity.

I'd rather Youtube and Google itself be split up under anti-trust laws. I don't want them to exist.

I'd rather people build smaller video websites for niche subjects so the internet is decentralized to the extent it was when it first started.

They make enough money off the rubes. They should just let us nerds have this one.

Thank you! I was doing the same thing, this is badly placed.

It is, yes. The issue being they might ban your ip address, which is the first reason why the instances are not playing videos specifically, and then you can not access Youtube servers from the IP you called the servers from. For example, if you use it this way from home without a vpn or orbot, you will likely not be able to access the Youtube servers after a ban from any device that is running over your router directly to the Youtube servers and not over a VPN. I do not know why they do this though, might just be the sheer amount of requests. Not sure, though just don't. Use protection. An Internet condom. Orbot is free and so is the free version of Proton VPN. Do not use random free VPNs though. If the VPN gets banned you slip on another condom.

Also, it is still your choice to use google services. I think if you are new to this (I am no veteran either lol) you should create a very clear threat model. And follow that model. If you notice it's not for you, alter it. If you need sources for what a threat model is, tell me. But basically, you can "downplay" google services all you want. There is probably some guy that is privacy minded and uses a stock pixel or worse a stock Samsung. And for him, that may be the perfect solution, as he doesn't really use his phone anyways or insert random reasoning.

+1 for Freetube, the best YouTube experience you can get.

Somehow I've missed the existence of this! Thank you for the recommendation!

uBlock Origin is really all you need for blocking ads, if you also wanna deal with the whole sponsors on videos SponsorBlock is a good companion!

The only answer is Ublock Origin.

Aside from that, you can do adblocking for your entire network and everything on it via Pi-hole. It requires no modification for the devices on your network and will work for literally any device connected to it.

If you combine those two, the odds of seeing any ad anywhere isn't zero, but it is close enough to zero to effectively be zero.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/](uBlock Origin)

Ublock origin.

I also add privacy badger in just to pass of the trackers.

uBlock Origin has worked great for me. No issues.

Had the same issue, updating the patches via the manager worked.

I do think something like Peertube would have a place but as you pointed out it's current desing limits their reach aka lacks proper Federation and the interface is nerdy and kind but absolutely awful to attract users so a failure for a default in my opinion.

There's a whack-a-mole of servers being blocked right now.

Yes, it does help to mask your IP address, but often I have faced issues with Video not loading.

I have found LibreTube to break more often than NewPipe due to this. There were instances where I was forced to use the Browser to watch the videos as Piped servers were having issues.

I honestly love all the efforts made by the devs of both to make YouTube so much privacy friendly and ad-free, but from POV of reliability, it just sucks for me.

It's important to know know that by this google still can't run their own fingerprinting scripts or fingerprinting stylesheets, nor set cookies, so while not ideal, it's not that bad.

I would suggest that (except when you watch something more private) until this gets somewhat more sorted, turning off video proxying is probably not a huge tradeoff. Also don't forget that FreeTube and NewPipe don't do proxying (FT can be set to do that, though)

There’s also not much people can do besides trying these work arounds and trying alternative options. YouTube has been the biggest video host for a decade for a reason, so a true alternative will take time.

Well both of those reddit alternative frontends used the api. Piped scrapes the pages and gets the stream url, similar to teddit, which still works.

What happened with Libreddit? My instance is still humming along same as it ever was.

What is bridging?

Wait-- I'm actually out of the loop on this. Why the downvotes and what's bad about Odysee?

You have to enjoy that irony