Most servers are not able to access the Google API.
Invidious report of the same(ish) problem: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/4045#issuecomment-1674373088
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.
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!
They’re making plenty of profit selling all of our data  and getting ad revenue from the 95%+ of other users who aren’t blocking them.
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.
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.
If youtube fixed their content ID system and stopped falsely demonitizing all the creators I watch then I would hapily pay for youtube red (or whatever they call it now). As it is though I’m not giving them my money just for them to pay copyright trolls with some of it. I’d rather give my money to noone than risk having some of it go to the people leaching off the completely broken content ID system.
How many people are using Piped, revanced, or the like? I doubt it is the majority. This move is highly likely more greed than anything.
Does Google care about our user experience? The short answer is no. Look at the intrusive ads, how long they are, them suggesting DRM, right wing pipeline, and more.
Look at how they treat their content creators. Demonetization, channel and copyright strikes, etc.
The list goes on. Youtube should and needs to be public. Internet is a utility and needed to survive by everyone. A video hosting service like Youtube is needed as well. Through every perspectice, Google is, ultimately, wrong in doing this.
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?
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’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.
Thanks. Worked for me.
Took me a while to find the setting under the audio and video section of the settings, because I was constantly looking for it under instance, general or advanced.
Got a question, I just found out about LibreTube from this post. I use NewPipe on phone and FreeTube on laptop, but LibreTube’s UI looks really good so want to give it a try. Is “YouTube will know your IP” a concern in terms of privacy or because of something else related to them know your IP is using apps that remove ads?
I’ve never been worried about YouTube knowing I use another app to access their stuff, so just curious if this is “just” about Google knowing you IP or something more.
I know this is the privacy community and don’t want to downplay the “Google knowing your IP” part but curious about this and being so explicit on the app setting as well when you turn it on
It is, yes. The issue being they might ban your ip address, which is the first reason why the instances are not playing videos specifically, and then you can not access Youtube servers from the IP you called the servers from. For example, if you use it this way from home without a vpn or orbot, you will likely not be able to access the Youtube servers after a ban from any device that is running over your router directly to the Youtube servers and not over a VPN. I do not know why they do this though, might just be the sheer amount of requests. Not sure, though just don’t. Use protection. An Internet condom. Orbot is free and so is the free version of Proton VPN. Do not use random free VPNs though. If the VPN gets banned you slip on another condom.
Does this also include using ReVanced? Because as I understand it it uses the official app.
Also, it is still your choice to use google services. I think if you are new to this (I am no veteran either lol) you should create a very clear threat model. And follow that model. If you notice it’s not for you, alter it. If you need sources for what a threat model is, tell me. But basically, you can “downplay” google services all you want. There is probably some guy that is privacy minded and uses a stock pixel or worse a stock Samsung. And for him, that may be the perfect solution, as he doesn’t really use his phone anyways or insert random reasoning.
Thanks for all the info, really good to know that’s a potential consequence of using these apps, I know they sometimes make multiple requests per video in parallel but naively I never gave it a second thought as potential consequences of that.
I’m not necessarily new to this, I’m trying to degoogle little by little. Ever since I started using home assistant I started thinking more and more about self hosting. I think their add-ons are a great way for the unexperienced user to easily start learning about self hosting small things (password manager, personal notes and wiki, etc).
I watch more YouTube than I do television these days.
As of now, I’m able to watch it ad free on both Brave and Firefox. I don’t have revanced as I’m more or less too technically stupid to do it.
If it becomes impossible to watch YouTube, I’ll walk away from it just like I did cable in 2009 and Netflix in 2023.
I haven’t sailed the high seas since the eighties, and I’d honestly prefer not to, but you gotta make a product that doesn’t consistently try to piss me off.
i can really recommend https://freetubeapp.io for desktop.
Somehow I’ve missed the existence of this! Thank you for the recommendation!
The only answer is Ublock Origin.
Aside from that, you can do adblocking for your entire network and everything on it via Pi-hole. It requires no modification for the devices on your network and will work for literally any device connected to it.
If you combine those two, the odds of seeing any ad anywhere isn’t zero, but it is close enough to zero to effectively be zero.
I have a pihole and it’s great. Unfortunately it doesn’t do much against YouTube ads, as the ads are served from the same server that the videos are sent from. I still recommend it- it’s great for random banner ads and embedded trackers.
Ublock origin definitely still works tho… For now.
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/](uBlock Origin)
It’s not trying to piss you off, it’s trying to make money, as it should. Do you have any idea how much money it costs to run the infrastructure behind YouTube? Neither do I, because it’s unfathomable.
I pay for YouTube Premium along with 5 friends. It’s $5 per month per person. Beats any streaming service by miles.
I do, however pirate all my movies (except for the occasional cinema visit) and TV shows.
If all you do is take without contributing you’re literally worthless to the platform any every other system you join. Your life will be a series of jumping to the next free platform that eventually crumbles to nothing.
Don’t want ads? Pay for premium. Want no ads and no payment? Why should anyone worry about your views? Your existence and use of a product then is a liability and not an asset
We’ve been spoiled hard by free money in the tech space. It’s going to bite and there won’t be a place to run eventually except community spaces like this that will never quite be sustainable long term.
They are definitely in a crackdown phase. Some revanced versions stopped working just yesterday, the yt-dlp stuff, the ad block block…
The best hope would be to get off of YouTube but that’s not happening any time soon given how expensive bandwidth is.
I updated mine last week cuz it was stopping videos a minute in. Seems to work for now.
Any kind of federated alternative would have to use P2P in some way, and I’m not sure how well that would work. Peertube appears to be exactly that, but testing a video just now showed that it was all from servers and none from peers, so how well it would work with thousands or millions of people watching at once, I can’t say.
If I watch something, I’m happy for my outgoing bandwidth to be the cost for that. Most of us have plenty of that to spare, even if my patience for adverts is zero.
How would content creators be paid? Not my problem, but being paid by advertising has not lead to an improvement in content for the most part. Shovelling out videos with zero actual real content is not something I want to encourage.
I guess that’s it then. If I’m forced to see ads and be tracked I’ll just block the domain on my network like I did reddit and invest that time in other things.
You can always grab a browser extension. Apple has Vinegar, not sure what others run. Just plucks the video feed direct pretty much like Piped. So no ads. Still stuck on YT unfortunately
Would it be possible for many, many people to use yt downloaders to fetch certain categories of yt videos (Linux tutorials for example) and serve them in a decentralized media network like the fediverse? Basically a distributed, downloaded “migration” of yt content, with no central source or authority that the pipe apps can retrieve from instead of YouTube. Yet again, I’ve basically just reinvented bittorrent but for YouTube content, so maybe it’s not that practical…
That totally sounds possible to me! The other person responding seems to not have very good reading comprehension. Yeah, the only thing stopping this would be drm but apparently most yt videos don’t have drm, since if they did, those downloader apps couldn’t work.
It’s not a half bad idea honestly.
No. They all have to connect via an API that ultimately Google controls and monitors. Unfortunately decentralized or not, they all tap into the same well.
But in any case, the extensions can’t be spotted by YT, so that’s why they have the best chance of co existing (or not easily).
