Are there any working instances of Invidious left?

Yes. Sending it now by PM to not make things too easy for YouTube. Even it requires a few tries, though.

I use invidious to search, copy the link, and use yt-dlp to download the video. You can get 1080p that way. If I wasn't lazy, I would write a script

yt-dlp works, magic-tape works, too, if you don't mind terminal interface.

Is there a good guide to self host?

My self hosted instance works great

My piped instance is still working https://piped.gravitywell.xyz

No. You could however run your own instance for yourself

https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/4734#issuecomment-2365205990

Hello,

Sad news for everyone. YouTube/Google has patched the latest workaround that we had in order to restore the video playback functionality.

Right now we have no other solutions/fixes. You may be able to get Invidious working on residential IP addresses (like at home) but on datacenter IP addresses Invidious won't work anymore. (Some datacenter IPs may still work, but that's a matter of time until they don't anymore.)

If you are interested to install Invidious at home, we remind you that we have a guide for that here: https://docs.invidious.io/installation/.

This is not the death of this project. We will still try to find new solutions, but this might take time, months probably.

I have updated the public instance list in order to reflect on the working public instances: https://instances.invidious.io/. Please don't abuse them since the number is really low.

Feel free to discuss this politely on Matrix or IRC.

I've been trying for weeks. Sometimes, using a random IP address with Proton VPN works for a few hours, but eventually, Freetube (or YouTube) seems to catch on and shuts me down. Gravitywell mentioned a piped instance, which was great but only worked for a minute or two for me. I think the days of being anonymous on YouTube are over—time to move on if privacy is important to you.

I've been using Grayjay and it seems to be a good front end for YouTube.

I don't think so, YouTube's new method for blocking third party clients seems to be difficult to work around. I have the Linux version of the NewPipe app and that seems to be working but I don't use VPNs, so I don't know if that would work for you.

Freetube on desktop, NewPipe on smartphone. And I have no problems with VPNs on both devices!

What works for me is freetube on desktop, and tubular/newpipe on AOSP.

I'd like to know if any of these frontends work with Mullvad VPN, because all the Mullvad servers I've tried have been blocked. Even on youtube.com I'm getting throttled to the point where all videos are 360p. Ridiculous, but I'm not turning my VPN off just for YouTube videos.

Not really at this point

I still use Invidious and Piped for searches and looking at comments, but they are currently broken (as far as I've seen).

@zdhzm2pgp@lemmy.ml same here. I stopped fighting via invidious and sadly I'm stuck with freetube, which is great, but I'd prefer a server side alternative

The below website provides the answer to your question: https://redirect.invidious.io/

That reminds me, I think I remember reading on the FreeTube page that they recommended using a VPN with it (this was before the current issues with Mullvad); anyone know why? Are FreeTube users in any danger of being hunted down by Sundar Pichai & co.?

I use freetube and grayjay

Self-hosted piped/invidious still working great if you want to follow this route. Everything from no-ads/sponsor block/comments works without any issues.

One downside however, is that you're exposing your own public IP to Google/YouTube :/.