I’ve seen the effects on invidious these past days. 8 in 10 instances have been broken. Google is putting some serious work into shutting alternate frontends down. Shows you how much of a dent they’re putting in the bottom line.
Shows you how much of a dent they’re putting in the bottom line.
Or how desperate google execs are to get even the tiniest bump in revenue.
GrayJay is the only one that seems to still work without issue but it’s getting updates very regularly.
Invidious and YouTube piped (and LibreTube) by default load the videos server-side, as opposed to GrayJay, NewPipe or Smarttube.
It has advantages (mostly that your IP address is not shared with YouTube, and it allows users from countries where YouTube is blocked to still access it) and inconvenients (much harder to keep up when YouTube actively seeks to block them).
hopefully they come up with a workaround.
I remember Hooktube. That was when front ends were still trying to play nice by accessing youtube the “right way”.
They killed that one off pretty hastily.
Invidious was the hero successor, but I think we all knew that it would eventually come to this. Invidious’ most recent fixes for blocking involve passing identity tokens, making a concession that Google is then better able to track users behind Invidious.
I’m not sure how much farther there is left to go on the technical angle of this fight.
