Google has been blocking many tools/IP ranges that try to synchronize with YouTube

I've seen the effects on invidious these past days. 8 in 10 instances have been broken. Google is putting some serious work into shutting alternate frontends down. Shows you how much of a dent they're putting in the bottom line.
- Shows you how much of a dent they’re putting in the bottom line.
  Or how desperate google execs are to get even the tiniest bump in revenue.
  
  LINE MUST GO UP AT ALL TIMES
- Invidious and YouTube piped (and LibreTube) by default load the videos server-side, as opposed to GrayJay, NewPipe or Smarttube.
  It has advantages (mostly that your IP address is not shared with YouTube, and it allows users from countries where YouTube is blocked to still access it) and inconvenients (much harder to keep up when YouTube actively seeks to block them).
- https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/4734#issuecomment-2349782180github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/4734#issuecomment-2349782180
  hopefully they come up with a workaround.
- I doubt it's denting the bottom* line as much as the recent court rulings. And I doubt it's as much paying bills as it is paying vested interests.
- I remember Hooktube. That was when front ends were still trying to play nice by accessing youtube the "right way".
  They killed that one off pretty hastily.
  Invidious was the hero successor, but I think we all knew that it would eventually come to this. Invidious' most recent fixes for blocking involve passing identity tokens, making a concession that Google is then better able to track users behind Invidious.
  I'm not sure how much farther there is left to go on the technical angle of this fight.

It's about time we try to de-google.
- YouTube and my existing Gmail is the only thing tying me back. And the occasional Google maps. I don't even use the rest of their services anymore
  
  THat sounds great! Gmail can be easily replaced, by like Proton mail or something.. Youtube is also very hard.. It's a vicious circle, "Youtubers" try to host their content elsewhere but nobody is looking. While some users also want to get rid of the youtube platform, but since most people are still and keep watching on YouTube, the content creators keep uploading there...
  
  highly reccomend Grayjay and Freetube. Futo claims to be foss but it is only source viewable (my apologies having a brain fart and cannot remember the actual term.) which to my knowledge means you can see the source code but not redistribute it. They ask for a one time $10 payment but the app functions the exact same with or without payment. Grayjay does not have a desktop application but they are looking for someone with experience to develop one. Freetube is open source and contains extra addons like de arrow and watching from invidious instances along with a desktop and mobile application. It's UI is less appealing than Grayjay ( at least personally) but it's the only way I watch youtube on PC now and I use Grayjay on mobile. Both of these contain sponsorblock too! ;)
  If you watch YouTube on an android TV you can sideload smart tube TV, which is ad free as well. While I personally don't reccomend it you can sign in with your yt account on both grayjay and smart tube to impket subscriptions.
  If you are looking for a solution for YouTube TV... Well... You may need to sail the 7 seas and live with not watching live (unless others have a solution for this.
  Fuck Google.
  
  And Waze :(
  
  gmail you can forward all mail to another account.
  Youtube, you could try following your subscriptions via RSS/ATOM feed reader. It's honestly just like regular YT but without the recommendation engine.
- I've been slowly working on it for the last year or so. It's gone a lot smoother than I thought it would.
- All of us together!
  
  I agree. But to be very honest, de-googling is very important but not always very easy. So I did personally move away already from Gmail. I also now host my own Nextcloud instance, which I use for my agenda as well as contacts. Meaning I also don't sync or store contacts or anything in Google. I don't use any cloud services for storage either, again Nextcloud (self hosted) solved that for me.
  Then I was never using ChromeOS, so that helps, I'm only using Linux. However, I do have an Android device. It's really hard to get rid of that, maybe a custom ROM, is that valid? Anyhow, and last but not least Google search, Google images, Google maps, etc. I don't want to go from Google Search to another big Microsoft corp, so moving to Bing is a no go. That also means all those meta search engines is also not a good alternative, which includes: DuckDuckGo, ecosia and alike.. Qitchain, presearch or Yacy isn't working for me either. It's just not good enough.
  Thus finding a good search alternative is hard! I'm actually considering as a software engineer to build my own.

I'm a YouTube creator, part of the partner program, and I also manually upload to TILvids. The videos I make generate about $100-$300 a year through the partner program, so I'm not a professional by any means. It feels like they're trying to keep creators from leaving by putting up small roadblocks that limit our reach beyond the platform. Given PeerTube's non-profit model, I see it as a potential future for content sharing. Though there are a few rock stars on YouTube, most of the creators on that platform make little to no money from publishing videos. There are more people like me than Linus Media Group.
- I would guess a significant number of "creators" are motivated by the idea of eventually becoming a hit and making much more money, though. And wouldn't really do it of they didn't have that dream.
  Not sure what percentage, though. Maybe less than I think.
- Yeah its really too bad how Youtube treats other video creators. Its a strange world. Hopefully peertube (given enough time) will have some viable options or at least an alternative. Is there any other platforms that work with video creators like yourself? I personally dont know of too many other than maybe twitch? I haven't been keeping up.

We need to slowdown YouTube and get an alternative that is viable for people and creators. The problem in this case is creators and brands, almost no creators would continue doing videos if there's no money at the end
- The problem with money being involved is it's an invitation to spam crap everywhere.
  One of my relatives has recently taken up "AI travel videos" and "AI cute videos" as a "hobby". No doubt based on the first thing that came up when I searched for those things, a video titled "make $10,000 a month spamming up YouTube with your AI slop".
  Oh, and it needs you to buy the AI slop generating tools that they happen to sell. How convenient!
  I mean, this also happened with broadcast TV, where we suddenly went from like 4 channels filled with programs and things competing for space, to 200 channels, where the rush was on to fill the gaps between the adverts as cheaply as possible with reality show tat. And that's all YouTube is now.
- The other problem is storage and bandwidth.
  
  The solution is decentralization of the web
- There is the PeerTube network, which works like Lemmy.
  
  This is one the best YouTube alternative but needs to be adopt massively
- Nah a little alt right content is entirely too much.
- It's subscription based, but Nebula is creator owned I believe. Sucks though that everything free gets acquired by some extractive company.
- Something community owned and a non-profit would be good.
  
  They're already halfway there /s
  
  Right, but again the problem is creators
- We probably need to have some kind of business that links up people looking for ads with in video monetization. Of course sponsor block Will negate that to some decent extent.
- Russia did it recently
  
  VK Video is indeed probably close to it, being a quasi state company. Theoretically they can not maximize profit extraction in all spaces, and keep the videos without unlimited propaganda. But Rutube is a profit-seeking company that is just smaller scale youtube. Let's see how the 1st will evolve over time.
  
  😂

The other day someone on lemmy kept trying to tell me that if google wanted to shut down ad blocking they would. But they don't, so it's ok.
Lol, spawn me that person plz.
- AdBlocking is 100% OK, that part is correct for sure. Ad networks (including Google's) routinely serve up scams and malware: It is foolish not to use a browser with a fully functional ad blocker at this point (i.e. avoid Chrome, use Firefox with uBlock origin).
  As for whether Google approves: Fuck Google! They have been serving up malware and scams in their ads. Their opinion should be irrelevant if you have any interest in protecting yourself, they have repeatedly proven they cannot and should not be trusted.
  
  Yes at this point why would any person would care what Google thinks? Google can go fuck themselves.
  
  If Google takes money to host an ad that's malware, they should be able to be prosecuted for it.
  This is different than simply hosting community content that they can't reasonably moderate. They're being given money to distribute these ads, so they can afford to moderate them.
  Which should be easy anyway. Ads shouldn't be able to install third-party shit from the advertisers on user computers. Google can easily restrict what can be included on an ad package.

Is this the reason why SmartTubeNext keeps breaking on my TV? The updates come pretty quickly but it's getting annoying cause my $1800 OLED has the processing power of a $50 Chinese Android phone and thus takes forever to install updates.
- 50$ Chinese android phone is faster tho
- It really is maddening how slow these expensive ass smart TVs are. Updating the software at all is often enough to make them nearly unusable
  
  Not to mention the hilariously tiny storage space. My TV came out in 2022, and has 8 freaking gigabytes of storage space. That's right, eight. Before I removed all the pre-installed bloat with ADB, it barely had enough space left to install one app fresh out of the box. It's like these smart TV manufacturers expect people to only use the built-in apps and nothing else ever.

I'm honestly surprised peertube has lasted as long as it has as it is
- It still lasts because there's no easy way YT can offer their own content without the video being available as a file stream (through CDNs at googlevideos subdomains). If they centralize everything to a single, controlled domain (so to allow things as one-time HTTPS request, better session checking and so on), they'd lost the capability of load balancing allowed by the decentralized nature of CDNs. YouTube downloaders (and, by extension, third-party YT frontends such as Invidious) exploit this CDN aspect to download the videos.
  It's common to see Invidious instances momentarily blocked. The blockage can't last forever for two reasons: firstly, IPs (especially IPv4) changes due to how ISPs offer IPv4 addresses through CGNAT, so the instance IPv4 (generally domestic servers) will eventually change (often to a completely different IPv4 range) and YouTube won't know that the new IP is a former "offender". Secondly, as IPv4s works through CGNAT, Google can't keep the bans forever because this IPv4 will be eventually rotated to another client from ISP that's completely unrelated and unaware of how their IPv4 was a former address for a downloader. It's like how Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/Facebook/phone-required services can't really keep a permanent ban for a specific prepaid number (especially on countries like Brazil, where ANATEL allows for phone number rotation when the mobile plan is cancelled), because the number will be potentially owned by another person with nothing to do with the former owner.
  So, in summary, Google can either end with YouTube CDNs (ditching their load balancing), or they can try to implement an innovative way to keep load balancing while serving the request one-time only, or they won't be able to do nothing but to perpetually catch themselves drying ice cubes.
  
  Maybe a stupid question, but how do paid streaming services avoid that issue?

That doesn't sound like it's an incredibly difficult problem to solve from a technical standpoint, if the creator is the one being hit. Just need either a software package -- or, if the limitation here is content creator bandwidth, service -- that pushes a video to multiple streaming video providers.
Might be an issue for third-parties creating mirrors of YouTube content, though.
- Yep thats whats happening here by the sound of it. TILVids is a very small instance that shares donated $$ with their creators. Its a very good way to try and keep creators on the platform.
  
  What are some good larger/general purpose peer tube instances? Last time I checked tilvids was one of the largest I found, so I seem to have missed a lot.

I wonder if these services are on small cloud providers. If so then they can just block their entire CIDR.
I wonder if they were to move to GPC if they would have better luck.
- Im seeing it from a residential IP. I think its more they have an allowlist rather than a blocklist nowadays. But I can only speculate. Piped stopped working a month or so ago on my personal instance and updates dont fix it. I can imagine for video uploaders, the issue is worse.
- Instead of blocking IPs, Google would just shut them down

This can be problematic for Peertube's adoption.
If user only uses Peertube to upload, they likely wouldn't notice a thing from this, but if it's a creator from Youtube that's trying to upload to multiple platforms this can cause major problems for ease of use and since the Peertube user base is small to begin with, this can potentially damage Peertube in the long run.

I've noticed a few people on Reddit taking about getting possibly shadow banned on YouTube, myself included. With no real explanation why? Every video just comes up as "content not available" when logged in. It started a week ago or so. I wonder if this is all related?

I took full advantage of invidious while it was still working, now I am anxious of ever going back to YouTube. It won't be long before they requiring giving them your iris scan before watching a video on that shit platform.

yt-dlp remains unaffected for now.
- yt-dlp is only affected when YT changes their algorithms (breaking yt-dlp data scrapping capabilities) or when it's used frequently with the same IP address (leading to automatic IP blockage). If you're using yt-dlp sporadically, it shouldn't be affected.
  
  I've hit that blockade before. Pushing yt-dlp over Tor usually does the trick.
- Is there a gui interface for that anywhere? I really can’t be bothered to learn the command line just to download a couple vids here and there. Especially when freetube still works for now. But if the barrier to entry was a little lower, I’d start backing up faves.
  
  The basic command is just yt-dlp 'www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ' tho.
  
  yt-dlg for windows
  
  There was a linux version but it seems to have gone poof. For Windows users there's : https://yt-bat.github.io/
  
  Seal for Android is a solid client

This sux big time, been using grayjay and it seems to be working alright thus far
- That's because it's all local to your device.

get newpipe and ublock origin if you want to screw with google:
https://newpipe.net/
https://ublockorigin.com/
- Alt nominations:
  Grayjay (Android)
  Freetube (PC)

Hmm. Per Facebook v. Power Ventures, it could be a (criminal) violation of the CFAA to "circumvent" IP blocks.

"Google shouldn't be allowed to operate as a loss leader" - Reddit and Lemmy
"Paying for the service? Fuck that" - Also lemmy and Reddit.
- Amazing. As if these communities are made with thousands of people having different opinions.
  And here's mine: since Google used their position to essentially destroy any competition in this area, why should be my duty to protect their revenue? Even if I can afford to pay their services, I won't and will actively discourage anyone else from doing so, by installing uBlock, ReVanced, NewPipe, SmartTube, GrayJay etc.
  
  It's not your duty at all but it's funny when you guys bitch about it with such fervor. It comes off as incredibly entitled.
  
  You can have a diverse community that has a large majority opinion. And what I said is certainly the prevailing opinion.
  And to answer you about your personal view: You are stealing the right to distribution and taking money away from both corporations but more importantly creators. And I've seen the rates of direct donations eg patrons . It's not ideological for most people, it's about getting content for free.
  Are you donating to every channel you are watching? I doubt it. Even the people who care mostly only donate directly to one of two top patrons, while still consuming many many more.
  If you are actually donating, then good for you, I congratulate you for living what you preach and have zero qualms. But you would be a statistical edge case.
- Why give money to YouTube when I can give it to my favorite creators, and the developers of the alt yt clients/mirrors I use?
  
  Because you have not set up that agreement and the vast majority of people don't pay outside of ads or a singular monthly sub.
  The next best thing is nebula which has 600,000 monthly subs at $5. Which means a maximum payout pool of 18M a year.
  Look at the number of users vs donations. The only reason this place works is low traffic and low bandwidth. The vision you describe would be great but it's not going to happen. ESPECIALLY once users are forced to pay rather than getting shit for free.