Today most Invidious instances are experiencing very harsh ip address rate limiting, it is becoming very very hard to watch yt videos through
AFAIK this is not what’s happening this time. YouTube slowly rolled out a change over the past 3 days that requires some sort of app verification for the android yt app. This is affecting Invidious since it emulates the yt android client to fetch video streams. This affects invidious instances hosted privately as well.
The maintainers are aware of this, and are working on ways to solve it. Tools like yt-dlp/newpipe still work because they have working implementations to fetch data by emulating web/iOS/etc clients.
google has been blocking any IP that uses lots of youtube bandwidth, and that means any public instance needs to do IP rotation.
I also heard they began blocking all IPs belonging to some cloud providers.
I run my own invidious instance from my home servr. Only I use it, so it’ll never be blocked, but I don’t have the same anonymity as if using a public instance…
It’s mostly for the benefits of using youtube ad-free without a google account, while having local bookmarks, watch-later, and subscription feed. If that’s your main goal Invidious is really easy to set-up.