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Piped/Invidious

In the lght of recent events (gloogel complaining about uBlock) I tried to investigate other available options out there. While Piped.video definitely works, it looks like it is only fluid for popular videos, and as soon as I want to watch something a little more obscure, it is basically impossible, I have infinite wheel spinning.

Have anyone here tried self hosting Piped/ Invidious, and could share a feedback about performance /usability ?

21 comments
  • I use the Piped instance piped.adminforge.de and it works well enough. How popular a video is doesn't make a difference but sometimes nothing will load for like half an hour or something. That's fairly rare tho.

  • I just set up Piped a few days ago, it was pretty simple to set up. The documentation in general is pretty shit, but there's enough info on how to set up the docker-compose, the script it runs is pretty good.

    I use it remotely at my farm over Starlink, pulling from the homelab that has a hardwired 150 down/15mbps upload speed, and it seems to work fine as a client. I put it behind a reverse proxy with basic auth to prevent randos from accessing it.

    Edit: so I've gotten down to using it and there's a lot I like about it vs. Youtube. Your feed is just your subs, nothing else. If you watch a video, you can set it in your prefs to not show it again in your feed. And you can just hit the Listen icon on an item and it'll only play the audio. There is absolutely nothing extraneous in your feed.

    Trending is just the default view a non-logged in user would see on Youtube. It's pretty useless. There is no algo for suggesting videos, so i you rely on that to get new content that's likely to appeal to you, that's not going to work well. If you watch a vid, it will include the Related videos you would see on the YT page, so maybe you can get some non-subbed content that way. Otherwise, it's all search to find new stuff. Which I'm ok with, I find I'll just hare off following the algo and waste a bunch of time watching half of a buncch of vids that I really didn't want to see. This keeps it focussed on my actual feed.

    I would like to be able to sleep items in my feed but I don't see an option for that.

  • I self host a personal Piped instance, and it works without issues for me. The videos load just as quickly as on YT itself, and the UI feels faster because it's not as bloated. Setting it up was fairly easy too, I just had to customize and run the docker compose config they provide.

21 comments