Not to be a downer but... how did people not anticipate this happening? Google is likely going to do everything they can to shut down non-official clients like Piped, since they're sidestepping all of YouTube's revenue streams. Hopefully they don't take the nuclear option and somehow lock down the API and make it much harder to download videos via tools like yt-dlp.
Privacy
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
I'm pretty sure most people anticipated it at some point. I just seems to be starting now.
I'm not going to be popular saying this but how is the service supposed to survive without a revenue stream? It takes a shit ton of bandwidth and storage to keep YouTube running, that ain't free.
I get that the ads are incredibly annoying but if you truly watch as much YouTube as some people in this thread are claiming, maybe it's worth paying for it? I bit the bullet and for basically the price of my cancelled Spotify subscription I now have no ads in YT and an okay streaming service with yt music.
Of course Google could do things better. And actually I think it would be important to have a competitor. But I wouldn't expect that one to be free either.
This is c/privacy. Are you really advocating for pouring money on the company (Google) that's doing everything it can to get to know everyone and use the information for showing deceiving ads, among other things? Or the company that supports false political propaganda? (In the form of paid advertisements). Support your creators, thats a very good thing, but for the love of god please do not fund this data mining machine.
I really am! If they don't get money, and they don't get data, and they (obviously) don't get donations, how are they supposed to run the service? Out of the goodness of their hearts?
They get enough money already. They are even spending on military tech research (google ventures), lobbying, and of course on their investors who have an unfulfillable hunger for money.
YouTube should be public infrastructure.
Yeah we're basically hurting their revenue by using Piped and other ways to bypass Google's ads. They wouldn't be profitable if everyone stopped watching those ads
Noooooooooo! The poor google 😢
their $412,378/s has been reduced to $412,367/s! 😭 😭
Yeah, they should provide thousands of gigiabits of video streaming to everyone for free. It's our right!
It's not for free. They use your data. Also most of these 'free' videos are made by enthusiasts.
Enthusiasts who want to earn money off the platform, yes.
Ah yes, because humans never want to share information, or show others something they've achieved or created. The only possible motivation could be money.
Big platforms tend to forget they're big because they're free. It's our duty to remind them.
I wish the product was somewhat good too. Piped has features that even YT Premium users don't have.
Well, if they implement their web integrity DRM thingy in Chrome and Youtube then that will prevent anything that's not a real approved browser from accessing the website, and with that the video streams. Not only Piped/Newpipe, but anything automated trying to access any website will be automatically locked out unless the website approves of it. New search engine bot? Archiving crawlers? Any type of third party program that accesses some website's content without approval? Dead.
It amazes me how entitled these Internet hippies are nowadays. You can't expect someone to provide such a huge service for free. If you don't like ads, pay for it. It's like $5 per month when you pay as a group..
I would pay if
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Google promised not collect any data but now you would pay and have your data collected.
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I just want load my subscription feed and they are all there not hidden away.
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Hid shorts or have them on separate tab.
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Bonus would be if related videos where acutely related videos in time span. Not the mess they are now.
Also why would I have to pay YouTube music? I don’t want that.
I would pay if they let me without compromising my anonymity.
They make enough money off the rubes. They should just let us nerds have this one.
I'd rather Youtube and Google itself be split up under anti-trust laws. I don't want them to exist.
I'd rather people build smaller video websites for niche subjects so the internet is decentralized to the extent it was when it first started.
If you are using LibreTube this is fixable by disabling piped proxies in the setting. HOWEVER do be warned that Youtube will know your IP, so you should only really do this while using a VPN service.
Real heroes don't wear capes, they give solid advice.
ps: thanks
I just wish Peertube had proper federation and a more accessible interface, some of their decitions sadly make is a unvaiable alternative! :(
Professional content creators probably aren't going to like the Fediverse in general since the design inherently limits their reach and there's just fundamentally less money in it for them. I don't think it works as a profession in its current form here.
It's time LibreTube moved on from Pipe Backend too. Too many times the app just doesn't work leading to server hopping and more.
I could use NewPipe but the app has a really terrible UI.
LibreTube existence is built upon Piped as far as I know. Even the developer wants you to donate to Piped instead of LibreTube as far as I remember.
Isn't Piped the only way to easily mask YouTube history with Google? So I think we should be very thankful of the existence of Piped
Yes, it does help to mask your IP address, but often I have faced issues with Video not loading.
I have found LibreTube to break more often than NewPipe due to this. There were instances where I was forced to use the Browser to watch the videos as Piped servers were having issues.
I honestly love all the efforts made by the devs of both to make YouTube so much privacy friendly and ad-free, but from POV of reliability, it just sucks for me.
NewPipe has been having a lot of issues as well. Videos crash a minute in and the only way to solve it is to clear cache which only works for one video.
It's not that bad i think. Better than having to endure adds..
You can tell it not to use Piped for fetching the video, but then that leads to Google knowing what you watches.
It's important to know know that by this google still can't run their own fingerprinting scripts or fingerprinting stylesheets, nor set cookies, so while not ideal, it's not that bad.
I would suggest that (except when you watch something more private) until this gets somewhat more sorted, turning off video proxying is probably not a huge tradeoff. Also don't forget that FreeTube and NewPipe don't do proxying (FT can be set to do that, though)
Good to know what was going on — I just noticed yesterday that piped vids weren’t loading for me.
why use proprietary when Peertube is free and libre
Because content is on youtube, and PeerTube does not have bridging capabilities. That's the reason.
What is bridging?
It's when you connect two unrelated platforms. If PeerTube had a YouTube bridge it would be able to play YouTube content directly on all of its instances without people having to re-upload anything.
It's actually the exact same problem, Youtube now blocks IPs on the video endpoint aka everything except for the actual stream works which is a new thi g to adapt to, they used to block access entirely before.
Just use a different instance. Alternatively you can use peertube
Piped has never worked for me, to the point where I blocked the bot that reposts all YouTube links.
Does YouTube even have an API for downloading videos? That would surprise me, even if it was for a fee. Their whole business model is adverts.
Would be cool if we had some foss AI based video format. Where it stores a 3d scene and animates it. Seen a prototype somewhere for a single face.
Then it'll be cheap enough to host your own stuff again instead of relying on YouTube.