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 :/.
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
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YouTube has blocked a bunch of IP ranges, including residential ones, forcing people to use an account to watch videos. So self-hosting isn't an option for everyone.
I've been using Grayjay and it seems to be a good front end for YouTube.
Freetube on desktop, NewPipe on smartphone. And I have no problems with VPNs on both devices!
yt-dlp works, magic-tape works, too, if you don't mind terminal interface.
a command line yt client, hell yes.
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.
My self hosted instance works great
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.
It's gotten to a point where I get "Sign-In to confirm you're not a bot" on my residential ip(s).
Which I won't, therefore no yt for me.
Luckily I've got better and more entertaining things to do.
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.
For me it usually works to change server/country if a video is not working. Sometimes it takes 2-3 tries, and it is annoying.
Yeah, same here! I have to turn off Mullvad when watching FreeTube which is definitely annoying.
Yeah, I was also using FreeTube when Mullvad got blocked. Mullvad's South African servers worked for me for a while but they're now blocked too, and I've tried a bunch of countries and all blocked. Annoyingly even yt-dlp is blocked with Mullvad on now, so I can't even use that to watch YouTube.
What works for me is freetube on desktop, and tubular/newpipe on AOSP.
Ups, I just got to enjoy piped and in particular pipeline on gnu+linux and libretube on AOSP.
Pipeline in particular allows to totally avoid electron (freetube), and in both cases the piped instance is the one communicating with youtube, not me, :) And both applications support sponsorblock (tubular does, but newpipe doesn't). But not talking directly to youtube is a win. Did I mention dropping another electron app, :) ?
But... I installed pipeline from AUR, because I don't like flatpak... Not sure if other user repos offer it as well...
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.
NewPipe works for me on Android
It stopped working for me recently. It'll play the first 5 seconds or so of the video and then just freeze up.
I use freetube and grayjay
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
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.?
the reason might be is that freetube can only proxy your usage over a server when using invidious, otherwise it needs to connect to youtube directly, making it possible for them to track you by IP (and by logged in users using yt from the same IP)
Whait what current issues with mullvad??
@Nonbinary_Sahrah
My recent experience: YouTube keeps on asking me to sign on (I never do) if I'm on the vpn. I'm using mullvad.
It sometimes works if I change location and always works if I turn off the vpn.
( I don't know if it's specific to mullvad though)
@zdhzm2pgp
I use FreeTube too and none Invidious instance work for me. So Local API only right now.