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
Newpipe or grayjay on mobile. Freetube on desktop.
Self hosted invidious with trusted-session-generator works for me.
Some Invidious instances are still partially functional.
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 :)
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.
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.
In an ideal world, creators would accept that only 10% of their viewers would contribute to them monetarily
Agreed.
(through patreon or donations)
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.
I think the only real path forward is for a developer to figure out a way to decentralize video hosting
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.
cheap as hell
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.
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.
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.
NewPipe hasn’t worked ever since the last 2 months
Weird, it’s been working just fine for me using version 0.27.2
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.
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. 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.
requires
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.
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.
Yes, privacy
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.
Change VPN exits
To what?
Another VPN exit. Just keep switching until you land on one that happe a 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.
Tor
