I got hit with the “sign in to confirm you’re not a bot today”. I thought I could get around it by firing up a vpn in a GDPR country, but I got the same notice there as well. YT-DLP gives me the same error, but curiously FreeTube, GrayJay, and NewPipe all seem to get around it. I don’t know for how long, but they seem to all be working for now.
I know the proper solution might just be to go touch grass, but I watch YouTube on a nearly daily basis and would like to get it working again in the browser without needing an account and on YT-DLP if anybody knows any solutions.
Also, I follow video/audio content through RSS and didn’t know if anybody had a good way to find out which creators post where. Whenever any creator mentioned they post elsewhere I always replaced the YouTube subscription with a subscription to them on anther platform. When I got the sign in error I went through my favorite creators and searched for them on Odysee and Rumble, finding a small but not insignificant amount of people I follow on Odysee.
Is there a good place to find out who posts where? Any sort of lists of which creators have their own PeerTube instances/channels, post audio content to substack/soundcloud, mirror to other video platforms like odysee/rumble, etc?
Thanks
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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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Newpipe or grayjay on mobile. Freetube on desktop.
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How much longer will each of us keep using YT? It feels like the end is coming. Of course it all depends on each person’s values and choices. And how fast YT tries to ratchet us down.
Tor
Some Invidious instances are still partially functional.
Change VPN exits
To what?
Another VPN exit. Just keep switching until you land on one that happens to have less people watching YouTube from it at any given moment.
What one works for you?
About one out of every 4 mullvad. It changes all the time.
I’m using https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local and it’s working without issue.
Is there something wrong with creating an account with fake info that you use just to watch YouTube?
Yes, privacy
Yes. For one, Google requires phone verification to create an account, and two, you would be giving Google a link to one specific account for every video you watch.
Just made a dummy account and it only asked for a phone number as a recovery method but happily let me skip it. Full 15gb of storage as well.
Interesting. Maybe it’s because I’m using a VPN and a privacy-oriented web browser to mitigate fingerprinting.
Not for everyone everywhere apparently. It seems dependent on some secret trust algorithm of your IP/fingerprint/something.
I made the same claim before and every time, people proved me wrong.
Privacy conscious users with their addons/settings, most likely they will.
Basically if they can’t link your account to a gmail or something where they know who you are, they will force you to add a phone number so that they know who you are.
The reason they have this service is to build a profile on you and sell that. They will not let you use the platform anonymously, hence the phone number requirement when they can’t figure out who you are by your fingerprint.
In the same boat. Besides other problems NewPipe hasn’t worked ever since the last 2 months, and honestly, I’m tired of chasing for different solutions.
I saw it coming and tried to work on my habits over the past year. Slowly reducing watchtime and cutting down the number of channels in general. It helps a lot. Also moved everything music related to other platforms.
I now gave Odysee a go as I feel its a very familiar experience. But it’s a disaster especially if I take a look at content in my native language. I’m happy with the few tech channels on there however, it will keep me afloat for a while if I have a particularily bad day and need to watch some stuff to regulate my feelings. So I’d also be interested in channel recommendations on other platforms and the like.
I was wondering if it wouldn’t be more important to take action at this point. You know, this could be a controversial topic, but I was thinking about some uniform text that everyone could use to send to their favourite content creators, informing about the situation and asking them to at least consider mirroring content to other platforms or move elsewhere. idk, just an idea. maybe it’s a starting point for further discussion on how to solve this mess.
Maybe it seems weird to do sth like this but in the end, it’s still YouTube, things tend to spread pretty quickly on there and I guess a few creators are very aware of whats going on already. So why not try. If all those still cling to this platforms, idk if things will ever change.YouTube will be happy to have those voices leave the platform anyway, pretty sure about that. But I thought more of the effect it might have if a certain crowd just decides to leave the platform.
The other thing, I know, money issues. It’s not an easy and quick thing to move a viewer base to a different platform, especially if you have the comfort of having a somewhat regular income on the other. We need to talk about solutions for this as well. And we need to ask ourselves the question how much we are willing to sacrifice in this process.
I guess what it all boils down to is: there’s other questions we need to ask ourselves now instead of just thinking about the next best solution on how we are able to consume free content again. And yes, I have a hard time with that myself.
We need more discussion, ideas, solutions, and some brains that can implement those ideas by creating the spaces we need. It’s all so difficult and so much to navigate.
sorry if this went a bit off-topic. hope you have a great day :)
NewPipe clients work fine, as long as they’re updated.
I use PipePipe and Tubular regularly, and both devs are pretty good about pushing out updates quickly when YT breaks.
As others have noted, this may be a VPN issue. I was having trouble with NewPipe, and simply changing the VPN server I was connected to fixed the issue. Also, check out PipePipe. It’s a fork of NewPipe with a built-in update checker (among other things).
Newpipe works for me. Try updating to the latest version.
Im on 0.27.2, more likely VPN issue
Does it work without a VPN? Maybe just turn off your VPN for the time being.
I followdiscussions on this topic so I’m aware of the VPN problems and that a solution would just be fiddling with the settings for a bit… Like I said, I’m tired of it/too lazy to even do that as I made my desicion to experiment with consuming less and independence from Youtube in general and am quite happy with how it goes at this point. There will be time I will get back to watch some very specific creators and the more girlie content I’m into as this stuff isn’t to be found elsewhere. But so far, I also spend a good chunk of that time on Lemmy or outisde irl/nature, which is kinda nice too. Still, thanks for the advice!
Weird, it’s been working just fine for me using version 0.27.2
I think the only real path forward is for a developer to figure out a way to decentralize video hosting. The future of the free internet is decentralization. We’ve seen which way the wind blows when platforms are centralized.
Consumer storage is abundant and cheap as hell. There will need to be incentives for: 1. Creators 2. Node hosters 3. Moderators. Potentially AI could do the heavy lifting on number 3. Figuring out a way to avoid ad based revenue would be another hurdle. In an ideal world, creators would accept that only 10% of their viewers would contribute to them monetarily (through patreon or donations) and use the platform for its freedom from corpo bullshit.
But as much as the Foss and decentralized crowd has been growing, I think we’re still a long way out from average people becoming fed up enough to care. I still get eye rolls from everybody I know IRL when I try to get them to open an invidious link.
That’s what Peertube is all about. It’s like the Lemmy version of Youtube. And it seems to have real funding and development mojo.
You’re right. I always thought Peertube was another YouTube frontend.
I think ipfs was supposed to be this but got bogged down in crypto shit. My memory is spotty on this tho
I wish Piped and Invidious were federated. It would make it so much harder to block.
If one instance gets blocked it could just pull video from another instance. Combine this with some sort of caching system and you would be golden.
Agreed.
and then you lapse into using “patreon” as if it’s a generic noun!
Not your intention I know, but this kind of corporate capture of minds has to end somehow.
Yeah we need developments like this but I guess that also goes hand in hand with educating people and empowering people, especially those that usually fall under the radar. You know, instead of just helping someone (say, elderly people or your little sister) out with their PC, actually taking the time and explaining how things work, the issues at hand etc.
We need people to have not just a better understanding of the tech they use in general but also and primarily about solutions on how to publish whatever content they produce themselves. It should be norm that people don’t rely on somebody else for sharing pics, music, videos whatever it is. You could go as far as to also say this about messaging and whatnot. Unfortunately we are far from that and the last decade(s) amd their media have made it all so convenient for most of us.
Besides the fact that technologies have their history and their infrastructure has always been to build ‘for the masses’, so this actually a huge step to make a u-turn now, thinking about decentralizing basically all that came out of years, decades of refining and building businesses by white males and whatever capitalist institutions they belonged to.
Agree, probably the majority of content creators won’t be able to earn enough money in such a decentralized/subsciption-based model, at least not enough to make a living. Then it’s more a question of how many people actually love doing this stuff enough they continue to fight for it (again). I’m not sure if this trend we’ve been seeing of super-rich or super-famous creators is kinda an illusion at this point for most that pursue this path currently, maybe it feels more like a trend of us watching each other entertain us while a few human slaves take care of providing the stuff we actually need, like food. On the other hand it’s just… well, made possible by this exact industry and connected business practices we’re critisizing here.
This industry exists for a reason, and maybe we should start loking there for solutions as well. We as a society just keep feeding this machine, and I don’t think it’s even possible to exclude Foss folks even if we try to avoid it or try to find our ways around certain technologies. It’s the mindset of consumerism, of being able to watch free content that we are conditioned to consume - plus kinda that greedy selfish habits we got into over the years, exploiting other people’s labour that can be similarily applied in the same context and for most other aspects of our lives as well - and that are so prevalent in our everyday lives, to a point it’s shocking to just watch humanity exist.
There’s something deeply wrong with humanity, and I don’t think we will be able to solve any ‘smaller’ issues if we can’t solve the bigger picture.
If you think about it, it goes deeper into society as a whole and capitalism etc. We kinda lost that feeling of being content. instead crossing the lines of wanting more and more on a daily basis, at the same time losing that deep human connection with every minute we spend isolated clinging to our devices instead. we are monsters. idk theres so much more to all of this. I’m rambling at this point and lost the plot.
One can only hope things change but we surely won’t move forward by just watching and doing nothing, especially not by avoiding that look in the mirror. At least thats what I figured for myself.
People roll their eyes constantly bc it’s kinda the only topic I talk about but it’s too important to not do it. I feel like as a millenial, its kind of my duty, as probably the biggest mistake our generation has done so far was to stay silent for way too long.
There have also been a few people extremely thankful for sharing a bit of knowledge here and there, and I don’t even consider myself as tech-savy. that’s what keeps me going.
Is it really? For hosting your content, sure. But once you stand up a public instance, I can imagine storage costs would climb pretty quickly.
Tubular has been working for me (97.5763% of the time) and so has Grayjay (98% of the time).
However, I do agree that we need a more effective way to just watch and enjoy. Unfortunately most creators are not willing to even entertain the idea of moving to a different platform.
On accessing Youtube: I’ve been using FreeTube for years and it’s great, it even has support for Sponsorblock, and your subscriptions are stored offline in the app, among other benefits. For the browser, there is also the Libredirect extension, which you can use to easily redirect to Piped or Invidious instances.
If you manage to get yt-dlp to work (btw check that you have the latest version), I’ve also used the “play with MPV” Firefox extension in the past.
Freetube is great, the android version has a few bugs so sometimes I use newpipe instead.
Self hosted invidious with trusted-session-generator works for me.