I feel like randomly promoting a really amazing Free Software project:

https://invidious.io/

Yes. Invidious is a self-hosted YouTube frontend. It provides a web interface for you to search/watch YouTube videos.

You can run it yourself, or use a public instance.

I installed *my own* private instance, on my network. It's working great.

Your browser won't run all the YouTube bloat. Invidious still has to run Youtube's challenge.

Really, really great project. Way better than YouTube Premium.

@libreleah interesting! I never thought of self hosting it. What's the implication of that challenge? How fast does a new video stream through invidious when it's never been seen before?

@PierricD pretty nicely actually. i mean it's just a function of how fast your internet is i guess. i have 100mbps uplink which is sufficient i reckon, for me and maybe one cool friend.

@PierricD i've got a test setup on my debian workstation. but i've got an arch linux test bench that i use for, mostly libreboot build testing. i'm likely going to move it to there, and host it properly. probably write a guide too, for my website fedfree.net

@libreleah YouTube Premium does have the benefit of giving each video's creator more money per view, if I remember correctly.

@krans donate $1 to the creator directly. that's more money than they'll ever get from youtube, if all their viewers did that. and not one cent goes to google.

@libreleah Serious question: have you tried doing that yourself?

@krans yes.

@krans when i like something enough, i pay.

@libreleah i pref https://github.com/user234683/youtube-local but use both, as each is buggy in different ways, so complement each other.

@libreleah Okay, yes, I pay a number of people via Patreon, but I think that, “The recommender algorithm suggested this mini documentary about sinkholes in Dorset and I learned something,” level of videos also deserve financial support.

“Track down the PayPal of everyone whose video you watch,” is not a thing anyone can do in practice. Therefore I can only conclude that (1) using Invidious will deprive people of income for their work and that (2) you're fine with this.

@krans i think your central thesis, that invidious takes money away from creators, is ultimately wrong, and the same kind of moral panic argument used for decades against such technologies. you also miss the point entirely, that this is about taking control away from google. google gives creators peanuts. almost all the revenue goes to google. if we take your argument to its extreme, then you're basically saying we should watch youtube.com with ads turned on, or pay for premium. no thank you.

@libreleah Actually, what I'm saying is that if you feel that strongly that Google is that evil, you shouldn't be using YouTube at all.

I believe that the long term solution to this is to support creative-run competitors, like Nebula.

For me personally, the cost of running an Invidious instance at home would be much higher than that of paying for Premium.

@krans i would recommend peertube instead.

@libreleah @krans @neil for those starting out (who have reached the payout threshold) YT creation does rather depend on the model of “each viewer earns me something”. Youtube appears to have started not counting adblocked views as well, so now there is an algorithmic penalty for the creator. For all of G/YTs many faults, if “manually send money to things you like” worked at scale as a compensation model, more FOSS projects would be fully funded. 2c

@interpipes @krans @neil all of this is yet more evidence of why google is bad. they keep piling shit on users and expecting them to tolerate it. ads (read: spyware in your browser) should be removed from the internet, in their entirety. and should upload their videos to a peertube account, preferably self-hosted. the centralisation of the web is precisely what people like myself wish to avoid.

if a few people profit from google's abusive practises, the risk is theirs. nothing to do with me.

@libreleah @krans @neil sorry, but for me this comes out to “to take some $ out of Gs pocket, I’m ok with doing the same to a person who’s video I watched but didn’t like enough to pay for and it’s their fault because they didn’t have the resources/time/tech chops to pay up front for hosting their video even though it offers no compensation, dramatically hurts their discoverability & audience size, all while I admit YT has utility in using this shim”

@libreleah @krans @neil it’s fine to be idealistic about how you want the world to be but you cannot pretend this is consequence free in the world that exists for the people for whom youtube is probably the best way to get started because that is where the audience is

@interpipes@thx.gg @libreleah@mas.to @krans@mastodon.me.uk @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk strange thing is I watch quite a lot of YouTube, put up with the ads, basically watch until the skip appears and click, and I seem to have no memory of any ads I have been shown!

@nick aiui marketing like that is mostly about saturation / familiarity, so that when you see it later during an “opportunity to purchase”, it is not alien to you

@libreleah @krans once upon a time I had a naive dream about automated, consolidated micro payments on platforms like peer tube, to voluntarily convert your likes into a few cents to each creator, every month.

I explained it very badly here: https://pierric.online/homelab/microdonations/

That was before peertube added the donation button, but in any case, that button doesn't achieve the goal of seamlessly dropping a few cents everywhere you go to get to an acceptable total of a few dollars by end of month.

@libreleah @interpipes @krans @neil As far as I know, about 70% of the money goes to google and only the remaining goes to the author (or in the case of some bogus ContentID flagging, which actually happens a lot more than you might think, all the money goes to google)

@libreleah @krans

You can also argue that a good chunk of medium sized or big sized YouTubers make a majority of their profits from sponsorships anyway.

@BlueChinchompa @krans i use a browser plugin called "sponsorblock for youtube" that works pretty nicely. it skips over the sponsor segments in videos.

i'm not sure how well it would work for invidious, though i suppose it could be modified; whatever database it has for youtube, could be adapted for use with invidious instances.

@libreleah

Sponsorblock does work on invidious just go into its settings and add your instance of choice.