1y ago

My Opinion: NewPipe, Piped, Invidious, etc's days are numbered.

With Reddit shutting down its API setting a precedent in the corporate tech world (and Reddit was a major outlier in that a ton of their users are technical minded and support third party clients, YouTube does not have that kind of userbase and will not get backlash for it), Twitter doing whatever the fuck they're doing, and Google already hellbent on destroying ad blockers, the days of Newpipe, Invidious, and Freetube are numbered. Wouldn't be surprised if they implement Netflix level DRM tomorrow that makes alt clients impossible. I say savour your alt clients while you can guys, you won't be able to soon.

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my current guess is: this problem will mostly fix itself
youtube-ads are ridiculous. I wouldn't consume these as they are now. If I'm forced to use that site without sponsorblock and adblock, I'm tending to just never watching anything there.
So if NewPipe/Sponsorblock (and of course NewPipe+Sponsorblock) are gone, then I won't use that shit anymore and don't feel any pain.
Same as with reddit. The last weeks I visited when pointed to reddit by some search enigne, but not out of "I could browse it for fun". I didn't miss anything. Twitter? Not even trying to visit that shithole anymore, since most links are unreadable anyways.
If platforms are closing down, they will lose my interactions. More free time for me!
- this is exactly my thought. these things are not essential for living. I will use them as long as they provide some fun. if they don't, too bad for them.
- The problem is that the content creators that I like are all on YouTube and nowhere else. There is no alternative.
  
  You will find new ones you like or you will watch less.
  Both is fine and you will survive.
  And if less people consume content on YouTube, less creators will upload their stuff ONLY there.
  
  The more incentives these companies create with their annoyances to the users the easier it is for alternatives to pop up.
- I've seen a few familiar faces on Thorium. Smart content creators will start putting their eggs in multiple baskets.

My understanding was that these programs don't rely on YouTube's API, but rather they are loading the page and scraping it for the relevant video files, comments, and other data. So it's a little harder to kill them than just shutting down API access. That said, with all the new web DRM crap getting pushed by Google and others, I can't imagine it will be long before they can detect that you aren't viewing the page the way they want you to view the page, and then block access in some other form.

Newpipe doesn't use YouTube's api to play videos, and it plays videos from pretty much any service that uses embedded video like YouTube does. I dont think its going anywhere anytime soon.
- I'm pretty sure the "trusted web" that Google is implementing in Chrome is exactly for that purpose: distinguish apps doing HTML scraping from users using a regular browser.
  If Google wants to break Newpipe, they'll find a way.
  
  I'm not that certain. The scraping in NewPipe has been broken and fixed a few times already. It could be a continually moving goalpost where the effort required from Google just isn't worth it considering the small userbase of NewPipe.

I wish that this risk encouraged people to migrate out of YouTube. Specially content creators. PeerTube could get a bit more people.
- I'm going to seriously consider completely discontinuing watching YouTube if NewPipe stops working. I still like plenty of non-FLOSS oriented channels that will never even consider a FLOSS or open web solution, but I think I owe it to myself to not accept Google's bullshit, not even use it from the browser, with or without the adblock ban. Not to protest Google's actions because I don't care, but to uphold my own values and interests. I need to heed my own advice and extended rants about big tech.
  
  I also think that I'll discontinue watching YT once this happens. I simply see no point spending my time in an advertisement-infested shithole, and yet that perfectly describes YouTube when accessed as Google/Alphabet "expects" you to.
- Specially content creators. PeerTube could get a bit more people.
  Youtube pays content creators.
  PeerTube costs content creators money.
  There's plenty of content creators aware of the issue, which is why nebula, floatplane etc. exist, but those are subscription models which most people don't want to pay.
  Sure, youtubes money is not all that creators get, see for example LinusTechTips 2020 numbers. But gutting your revenue by ~25% would hurt hard.
  Especially when costs go up at the same time.
  
  YouTube pays content creators poorly so most of them rely on direct sponsorship rather than YouTube rev share.
  Also YouTube is a nightmare for content creators because you can have videos delisted for a few swear words and the process is random and unpredictable. They would benefit from more independence.
- The content creators kinda did already - that's what Nebula is - any place the famous names move to would be one that includes some sort of payment system either on the video site or on Patreon.
  
  I wish content creators learned at least one lesson from big tech. If it isn't what butters your bread steal from push that work to community where you can, leverage opensource so you customize where you need to quickly. The fact that Nebula, Floatplane, CuriousityStream, Dropout, etc are all eating engineering cost to attempt to complete against Google, Disney, Netflix, Fox, Etc is wild to me.
  Ehh maybe I'm the moron and the special special sauce isn't the content but the slightly different video format and selection screen they are paying some third party to work for them (or building in house).

Readily available content for everybody is the whole reason YouTube got so big.
So either the world would riot because YT is so popular, or the world would accept its fate, because YT is so popular.
Which one is it going to be? You decide
But then again, the overwhelming majority of people don't even know that there's other ways to watch YT
- The vast majority of their userbase already puts up with it, so I doubt they will see any significant backlash. Even if all the FLOSS creators leave, they're still a tiny minority because it's """influencer""" channels like the Pauls and content farms like Bright Side that are the real cash cows on the platform.
  Also, a huge part of their userbase is children. Probably more than any other mainstream social media platform. They won't even understand the concept of DRM or corporate bullshittery and will only use the YouTube app or browser anyway. Kids are also less likely to be bothered by ads, might not even understand what the purpose of an ad is, in fact they will just see them as more content which is why advertising to kids is so unreasonably effective.
  
  Oh yeah, right after sending it I realized that my hopes with this comment are exclusive to our little FOSS bubble
  I guess I'm going to start looking for content I like on Peertube. Barely anyone I watch is on alternative platforms, with the exception of HardwareUnboxed on Odysee, so we'll see what I can find.
  
  This is why it is so super important to educate kids on media and tech literacy. They need to understand that YouTube is not the only source of videos, that you can not only buy your stuff on Amazon, and that Google is not the only place to search. They need to know that nothing is free, and that they are being monitored. And that there are choices.
  I was super mad with our kid's school, because they only allowed the kids to have Microsoft office. It's not about the tools - they'll change by the time they graduate - but about the results.
- The problem is that hosting videos at scale is hard and expensive.
  We can migrate from Twitter to Mastodon or Reddit to Lemmy, but what PeerTube instance is going to be able to serve videos for content creators like LTT or MKBHD?
  
  I have hosted a PeerTube instance and surprisingly the storage is not a problem because it is very cheap these days.
  About the bandwidth, if you enable PeerTube's p2p tech (WebTorrent) you can have a fair number of users streaming at the same time (but it's not great for privacy).
  I have proposed a network of PeerTube instances to a group of youtubers each with tens to hundreds of thousands subscribers and the benefits/costs ratio looked pretty good to them. It didn't work for other reasons.
  Notice that youtubers earn basically nothing from YouTube except those with millions of subscribers. They are on YouTube just for visibility but if enough creators move at the same time they can also move a good percentage of the userbase in my opinion.
  
  I'd never expect channels this big to do it, because yeah, that's a whole lot of server load

What about yt-dlp I wonder? Can we still scrap videos after this?
- Probably not. There's no netflix-dl for a reason.
  
  And yet it's still ripped and on torrent sites. Not sure how they do it.
  
  That reason is you haven't looked for it.

Author of Piped here.
I think it is quite unlikely for YouTube to implement a DRM for watching videos. In anyways, we will keep fighting collaboratively as long as we can.
The most likely way YouTube probably will affect us currently is if they decide to log in wall their platform like how Twitter did.
- In anyways, we will keep fighting collaboratively as long as we can.
  You're doing god's work!

It WILL break legacy and underpowered devices, so its likely they won't at least not too soon. Those apps rely on the files hosted on the googlevideo servers, and most that are used are meant for legacy browsers.
- I've never pegged Google as particularly giving a shit about legacy support though. They kill things out of the blue without warning or explanation.
  
  For the most used services, legacy support is actually respected by Google.
  Google Search still works on Internet Explorer 6 for Windows 98 and XP.

Odyssy, Lbrary
- IIRC lbry is bankrupt due to some bitcoin thing with the SEC, not sure how long they'll be around for

While it lasts, what is a good adfree foss yt player on ios?
- I don't think there are any that don't require jailbreak/sideloading, but you can always use the browser versions like Invidious or Piped!
- Yattee is a foss youtube app for iOS. It has sponsorblock builtin too.
- I use uYou+ through AltStore
- I just "installed" the piped website, works fine.
- Yattee
  https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yattee/id1595136629
  https://github.com/yattee/yattee
  
  This. I’m currently hosting Invidious and accessing it with Yattee on my iOS devices. It’s been amazing how clean of an experience I’ve had.

idk, i wonder if youtube could even work if you always had to be logged in. when i imagine what most of youtube's activity is, i think of the foreign music videos with billions of views. could their ad model with those kinds of numbers possibly work if they put account auth barriers in front of it? how many hotel lobbies, barber shops, etc are playing youtube on loop logged out worldwide? netflix level drm would radically change the platform.

You think YouTube will stop Tor users? That's blocking them from hundreds of millions of users whose internet blocks YouTube without TorBrowseer.
Don't worry, big evil corporations wouldn't shut out such huge market segments.

64 comments