Good bye invidious
Sadly the main instance of invidious is shutting down. Details here: https://omar.yt/posts/stepping-away-from-open-source
> Good bye invidious
This is misleading. Invidious is not going anywhere. Only one instance.
> Sadly the main instance of invidious is shutting down
I don't necessarily see it as sad that Invidious has outgrown the need for its original flagship instance. It sounds like Omarroth doesn't take as much pleasure in the project now that it has become larger and serves more people, and that's a little sad, but ultimately a mark of some degree of success.
> Invidious is not going anywhere. Only one instance.
I actually did not fully understand the situation when I wrote this. Although Invidious is free software, so the code *can* survive even though the creator has stopped development, it only *will* survive if someone else steps up to maintain it. So far that has not happened. Other Invidious instances work for now, but the next time YouTube makes a change that breaks Invidious, Omar will not be there to fix it, and unless someone else is able to fix it, all Invidious instances will be screwed.
The Bibliogram* developer is working on a Python reimplementation[1] of the Invidous API based on youtube-dl. The fact that it has been easier to find someone willing to rewrite Invidious in Python than to find someone willing to maintain the existing Crystal codebase maybe teaches a lesson about starting projects in niche programming languages.
* Bibliogram is the Instagram equivalent of Invidious
I am a member!
On 8/30/20 12:15 AM, name at domain wrote:
> The fact that it has been easier to find someone willing to rewrite
> Invidious in Python than to find someone willing to maintain the
> existing Crystal codebase maybe teaches a lesson about starting projects
> in niche programming languages.
Ouch. Also, what on Earth is Crystal?
--
Caleb Herbert
KE0VVT
(816) 892-9669
https://bluehome.net/csh
The main instance hasn't worked well consistently for months. I think most of us were using snopyta already anyway - https://invidious.snopyta.org/
I wish Omar nothing but the best. He's a member here and was discussing invidio.us in the forums here when he first launched it. Some of the members here gave him early funding when he needed a way to pay for the initial server.
The project has been a joy to use, a real game changer. I hope that it continues for many years to come. Or better yet that it's not even necessary this time next year because of the success of competing, decentralized video sharing platforms.
"Linus Torvalds hardly does any coding anymore."
https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=H8Gd9t7FQqI
I'm surprised he pronounces his own name LIE-NUS. In his native Swedish it's LEE-NUS (toor-walds).
He says "I'm Lie-nus", and then immediately says "many of you may have seen the so-called Dirk and LEE-nus show". Clearly he wants to be all things to all people.
For those in or near America - the snopyta instance of invidious seems to be having connection problems, but a US-based site called invidious.site is working well for me.
Also, a lot of youtube channels are putting their content on bitchute, and you can search duckduckgo for the youtube video ID and get a bitchute link in a lot of cases. The youtube ID is the alphanumeric identifier in a youtube link. For example, the ID would be "V61Nj07o2pQ" in the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V61Nj07o2pQ. Searching for "V61Nj07o2pQ" on duckduckgo brings up the link for the bitchute copy of the video, https://www.bitchute.com/video/V61Nj07o2pQ/.
> you can search duckduckgo for the youtube video ID and get a bitchute link in a lot of cases
Bitchute doesn't work unless you allow it to run ton of proprietary god-knows-what in your browser. You can get around this using youtube-dl, but at that point you might as well just yt-dl the original YouTube link.
> Bitchute doesn't work unless you allow it to run ton of proprietary god-knows-what in your browser. You can get around this using youtube-dl, but at that point you might as well just yt-dl the original YouTube link.
As do most peertube videos, as do most invidious instances which require you to allow googlevideo js. When snopyta is working well it doesn't require non-free js, but I think most other video sites do. Then you have to decide if you really want to watch video in a browser and pick your poison, or just not watch it that way.
> As do most peertube videos
Peertube is free software. Bitchute is not.
Bitchute is also rather sketchy. They claim to be decentralized, and that the JS is for p2p. That might be partly true, but I can get direct download links for videos via youtube-dl without using their JS. I just ran
$ youtube-dl -g https://www.bitchute.com/video/V61Nj07o2pQ/
four times in a row and got
https://seed118.bitchute.com/KxfE8MXNPekx/V61Nj07o2pQ.mp4
https://seed116.bitchute.com/KxfE8MXNPekx/V61Nj07o2pQ.mp4
https://seed117.bitchute.com/KxfE8MXNPekx/V61Nj07o2pQ.mp4
https://seed119.bitchute.com/KxfE8MXNPekx/V61Nj07o2pQ.mp4
It looks like they have a bunch of different subdomains, each with a copy of the video, and youtube-dl gets a direct download link from a different one each time. Maybe the JS would actually use bittorrent to download from all of these at once, but p2p isn't really p2p when your "peers" are one company's servers.
Also consider the motivations of the developers. Whereas Peertube is funded by dontations, Bitchute is funded by investors, who are expecting a return on their investment. I'm not sure if/how they are making any money right now. If they become desparate there is nothing to stop them from selling user data, if they aren't doing that already.
> as do most invidious instances which require you to allow googlevideo js
No they don't. You're might be confused by NoScript's UI (like I was at first). NoScript blocks both JS and third-party media by default, but doesn't clearly distinguish the two in the permissions dropdown. If Invidious is not configured to proxy videos, then the browser downloads the video from a googlevideo.com URI, just like youtube-dl, but in NoScript this looks the same as if it were downloading JS. It's not though.
If an Invidious instance does not appear to be loading media from googlevideo, then the admin of that instance probably has proxying enabled by default. Most instances disable proxying by default, because it puts a much greater load on the Invidious instance. They usually leave it as a option though, which can either be configured on the settings page or for an individual video by appending "&local=true" to the URL.
Oh cool, and Bitchute uses Cloudflare too. I'm not even sure it's any better than just using YouTube at this point.
It seems their target audience is facists and conspiracy theorists who have been banned or demonitized by YouTube. I guess as a smaller company than Google they are able to fly under the radar of regulators for now. Doesn't seem sustainable though. I'm not sure what their plan is if they ever grow into a significant platform associated with that kind of content.