Project future

[omarroth]

Starting September 1st, I'm shutting down the user-facing portion of https://invidio.us and stepping away from development. You can read more here.

@Perflyst has been promoted to project owner.

[Perflyst]

Please note that I am not a developer. Therefore, I will most likely not be able to implement breaking changes from YouTube in Invidious.
I will do my best to manage the issue section and to answer questions. Previous code collaborations were also invited to the GitHub organization.

[cloudrac3r]

While I'm here at the top of the thread, I'll start a list of things you can switch to for youtube viewing alternatives.

The most obvious answer is to just go on youtube. If this isn't acceptable, read on.

You can go to https://instances.invidio.us to see a list of other instances that will hopefully stay running. Please pick random entries from that list to find your new home. If everyone picks the options at the top, those instances will likely be overwhelmed with new users, and become extremely shaky or forced to close entirely.

For android phones, use NewPipe. NewPipe does not rely on Invidious.

To download videos, use youtube-dl, or one of the many frontends for it.

My website, https://cadence.moe/cloudtube/subscriptions, uses the Invidious API. I will try to keep it running, since I use it myself, but at this point it is basically unmaintained.

FreeTube https://freetubeapp.io can either use the Invidious API or the built-in extractor. It is maintained and a rewrite of the code is being actively developed by Preston, and myself.

For an implementation of the API, my project here implements a few endpoints by calling the youtube-dl command line and reformatting the response into JSON on a webserver. I intend to develop this further. https://github.com/cloudrac3r/youtubedl-invidious

For RSS, youtube offers RSS feeds directly.

This list may be updated in the future.

[iAmNoVa-UXX]

Thank you for what you have provided @omarroth we appreciate what you've done

[ghost]

Is this only for the invidio domain or does this affect every other domain alongside it? I use Snopyta and Yewtube whenever the main domain has issues.

[Zero3K]

Is this only for the invidio domain or does this affect every other domain alongside it? I use Snopyta and Yewtube whenever the main domain has issues.

It only affects the invidio domain. It will eventually affect the other domains if no one can improve/fix the project as needed.

[pluja]

I am building Parasitter. It is an app to follow and watch Youtube and Twitter with privacy. It uses Nitter's RSS feeds and Invidiou's API and RSS feeds. I will try to keep it up and I will investigate to see if I can break de dependence with Invidious API.

[GauthierPLM]

Thank you for your hard work.
You built more than a side project, you built a real alternative to YouTube, that respect privacy without cutting on features or requiring to give up on our subscriptions and watching habits.

Good luck for whatever you will do next, and please know that you built something really meaningful and should be proud of the work done, and your investment in this project.

[musq]

I love your decision to take care of yourself!

[aadcg]

Thank you for all the hard work!

[SuperSandro2000]

The title of your post is very misleading. You are not stepping away any millimeter from open source software, just from maintaining invidious.

If I had experience in Crystal I would definitely find some time to contribute but I have none in Crystal or similar languages. Choosing niche programming languages for projects has its drawbacks.. sadly.

[CSDUMMI]

@SuperSandro2000 I am thinking about learning Crystal.
Is is worth it?

[Draphar]

I discover such an awesome project, and a week later this happens... thanks for you work though!

[CSDUMMI]

It's not gone.
I have a question:
Is it at all possible for Invidious to join the Fediverse?
Fediverse

[resynth1943]

Invidious in the fediverse would be interesting, indeed. Perhaps you could even create ActivityPub accounts for a YouTuber dynamically? And then have their videos posted in the stream?

All good ideas!

[robert5800]

Wait does this mean that https://invidio.us will be shut down forever..? Sorry I'm kind of a noob.

[Booteille]

Hi!

Thanks for the hard work you did past years, Omar, it has been very appreciated and you opened the way for different cool projets (Nitter, Bibliogram, etc.).
So, thank you very much for all you did for everyone.

I have two questions, though.
The first one is for you, @omarroth: Are you about to give/sell the domain to someone? To @Perflyst? I am a bit worried that scammers or whatever would get the domain and scam users which don't know that this instance in unmaintained.
Edit: I just saw this other thread, talking about that.

The second one is for you, @Perflyst. Since you are not a developer, are you willing to seek actively a second maintainer, which would help with programming? I know it can be pretty hard, especially since Crystal does not seem to be a very known language.

Anyway, thanks again, both of you, for what you did already for Invidious. It's really appreciated.

[Perflyst]

The domain will not be sold, for now omarroth keeps it and if in any case he wants to get rid of it I am sure it will stay in the community.

are you willing to seek actively a second maintainer

I am not sure how that should work. The attention on Omar's blog post is now at its highest. There are threads on Reddit and Hackernews. After the whole thing flattens out again, it becomes even more difficult to find a new maintainer.

[Booteille]

The domain will not be sold, for now omarroth keeps it and if in any case he wants to get rid of it I am sure it will stay in the community.

Perfect. That's what I wanted to read!

are you willing to seek actively a second maintainer

I am not sure how that should work. The attention on Omar's blog post is now at its highest. There are threads on Reddit and Hackernews. After the whole thing flattens out again, it becomes even more difficult to find a new maintainer.

Yeah, definitely.

Maybe If you are willing to find another maintainer to help you on this side, maybe we could use this momentum and the community to help to find a Crystal developer.

Anyway, I am happy you decided to maintain the project.

[ghost]

What's the next recommended Instance for now? I usually try Snopyta but NoScript blocks the video (even after setting permissions) unless i use Dash quality only, but that only ever gives me 360p video when i use that. I also tried Yewtube but that wouldn't let me import my .us settings into it (Just says "A bug has been found in Invidious)

[chxseh]

@WandeingLagomorph793 I've had success importing YouTube & Invidious data as "youtube subscriptions"

[ghost]

@WandeingLagomorph793 I've had success importing YouTube & Invidious data as "youtube subscriptions"

Does it matter if it's .json? I used it's regular format for Snopyta and that transferred fine for that.

[Booteille]

What's the next recommended Instance for now? I usually try Snopyta but NoScript blocks the video (even after setting permissions) unless i use Dash quality only, but that only ever gives me 360p video when i use that. I also tried Yewtube but that wouldn't let me import my .us settings into it (Just says "A bug has been found in Invidious)

You should try any instance up to date.

Check https://instances.invidio.us/

[resynth1943]

Honestly, looking at this issue now. Invidious is practically screaming for a URI scheme, e.g. invidious://video/..., so we can easily switch which instance we use.

This would avoid the whole "stop linking to invidio.us" debacle.

[trymeouteh]

Thanks for handing the project over to someone and not walking away it. And thank you for all you have done for invidious

[resynth1943]

@Perflyst while I love that Omar Roth has made you a maintainer, I can't see how Invidious would keep up with YouTube's tomfoolery against Invidious without a dedicated maintainer that can code. As you said yourself, you are not a programmer, so who is going to keep the project's code up to date?

Has anyone offered to do this, yet?

(there was a blog article about this, I'm just mirroring it)

[Perflyst]

You are right, this is a problem we are aware of.

Has anyone offered to do this, yet?

Nobody yet, but we all hope that someone is interested in developing the project further

[resynth1943]

Hopefully... I would offer to help, but a lot of it is in Crystal.

[Hepativore]

I understand omarroth's reasons for leaving Invidious, but I am not sure what to use as a replacement, now. This was the same fate of another YouTube frontend called Hooktube. The problem is that the YouTube website itself is almost unusable as it is bogged down with ads and finding many videos is difficult due to the horrible search algorithm that YouTube has not to mention all of the data-mining that Google does through YouTube. Finally, this is the only frontend that I have seen that gives you the option to stream videos in audio-only.

Another good thing about Invidious is the fact that there are several add-ons for Firefox that redirect YouTube links to their Invidious equivalent, as well as embed Invidious players in place of an embedded YouTube video on a website. If anybody can recommend a frontend that has similar support in terms of website add-ons, I will be much obliged. I took a look at Freetube.io, but it looks like you need to download it first to use it which I cannot do on my work computer.

I second the idea of omarroth finding a maintainer while he is away. Invidious is too useful of a website to let it languish.

[resynth1943]

Lol fair I guess. It is in the UK, so... 🎉

[unixfox]

The shutdown won't happen automatically at midnight, I suspect that omarroth will just have to do it manually during the day but we won't know in advance the exact moment.

[elypter]

thanks for everything @omarroth. i am confident that this project lives on in its mirror instances but even if it doesn't it provided a great value while it was running.

[resynth1943]

It's gone now, @unixfox. I'll be keeping an eye on this project...

[pluja]

Checkout Yotter, the written-in-python Invidious alternative that I'm building. All contributors are really welcome and needed!

[notpushkin]

Thank you so much for your great work, @omarroth!

Re: list of alternatives, mpv works in tandem with youtube-dl so you can play youtube videos by just passing a link, like mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NICYIWy007c.

Re: Invidious future: I think outsourcing the YouTube-facing portion to youtube-dl is the way to go, but we also need to start building a more decentralized solution, because we'll certainly have many instances like we have now with Invidious, and transparent cooperation between instances could be helpful to work around rate limits, bans, geo-restricted content etc.

@pluja @cloudrac3r Any chance you could cooperate on Yotter / Second?

[notpushkin]

For example, we could go like this:

• one frontend (i. e. on the invidio.us domain) that queries Second instances either directly from browser (needs JS enabled and CORS support) or from server (one more hop but should be OK for metadata)
• if a Second instance is down, another one is selected automatically (or can be switched manually if needed)
• https://invidio.us/api/* redirects to a random Second instance
• videos are played in a local player or, if DASH is needed, as an iframe from the selected Second instance's origin (if proxying support is enabled on said instance)
• if mpv/IINA/other YouTube-supporting player is installed, videos could be opened there instead (Support for opening in local players #806)
• Web Monetization could be used to support Second instance owners, the Invidious project as a whole and of course video authors :)

[ExpandingMan]

Seems like there are a number of exciting possibilities for alternatives. I have been surveying the options a bit and have found the following:

• FreeTube is slow, buggy mess (the authors have pretty much admitted as such, so I'm not saying anything controversial here), but the Vue.js rewrite seems to be on a good track and seems quite usable already.
• NewPipe is really great, and is now what I use excslusively on mobile. It's really unfortunate that it's very much a dedicated android app, written in Java. Presumably it can be used elsewhere with Anbox, but it'll probably never be a good option for desktops.
• youtube-dl seems to be the most mature, well-maintained web-scraping back-end and a number of projects have been built over it, but unfortunately its functionality is very focused on downloading videos, so some of the most useful aspects of invidious (for me, at least) really just aren't available through youtube-dl (as far as I can tell).
• I haven't tried Yotter or Second myself, but they look promising.

I can help but feel that many of these projects conflate what I really think should be separate components. Really what we need is a core web-scaping program, and then whatever else can be built on top of that. youtube-dl almost is that, but again, it really seems totally focused on scraping videos, and there is some crucial metadata (particularly channels) that it doesn't seem to touch (please correct me if I'm wrong).

[user234683]

@ExpandingMan My project youtube-local is another option. It has the scraping code separated into a module called yt_data_extract. There's also a list of similar projects at the bottom that might be worth looking into.

Advantages of yt_data_extract:

• Written in Python
• Decoupled from the rest of the project
• Lots of general-purpose abstractions specially designed for parsing the polymer format (polymer refers to the 2017-present "new" Youtube layout, and the JSON API it provides), instead of hardcoding the particular JSON key trees, which change regularly.

Disadvantages:

• Undocumented (I'm willing to write documentation if there's interest in using this)
• Does not return the same names/organization for data as the Invidious API does, so it cannot be used as a drop-in replacement without adjustment or a translation layer.
• No unit tests yet (something I'm planning on adding)
• The module only contains code for parsing polymer responses from the Youtube endpoints. It does not have the code for which particular requests to send out, such as what endpoints to use, in what order, and how to generate the continuation tokens necessary to use them (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/browse_ajax?ctoken=[...]). The request code is tightly coupled with the rest of the project.
• Probably rough around the edges, since this is just a small hobby project.

The most straightforward way to adapt this into a core web scraping program would be to write code around it that handles the requests, passes them to yt_data_extract, and then exposes an API in the Invidious format. I'm willing to provide pointers/guidance on this and answer questions, though I can't commit significant time to it.

[thestigmister]

Not a technical comment, just me commenting on this situation.

Oh man, I really liked invidio.us. I don't even know if the other instances work cos they don't seem to at the moment.
I mainly used it cos I have a first gen iPad and the YouTube apps don't work pre iOS 6 (I've tried TubeFixer and it still doesn't work) so I was using invidio.us to watch YT videos on my iPad via browser.
Sure it wasn't my primary YT viewer but it was cool to be able to, especially with the big (albeit weirdly ratio'd) screen.

The alternatives mentioned like Cadence doesn't seem to work on my iPad.
If anyone does know any other way to watch YT on old Apple devices, I'd really appreciate it.

[notpushkin]

if the other instances work

Some of them do, but apparently not all the time. invidious.fdn.fr was the most stable for me at the time I tested, but I've switched to running plain YouTube in a separate Mozilla container tab instead. I'm still hoping the Invidious ecosystem grows to be a bit more stable so I can use it once again!

[ImprovedTube]

Indivio.us used to lead my watchlist for the unique API server powering features like this:
google.com/Webstore/Annotations-restored (which we were finally implementing too :/ )
Now this data wont be accessible anytime soon. ( besides maybe another developer starts over from whats at archive.org)

What about decentralizing the API database? (Or just a download / torrent)
What about anybody or us taking custody of it?

Why's everybody leaving? :/ these projects are like baby alpacas

-----

Many smiles to @omarroth @Perflyst & Co
<3

[unixfox]

@ImprovedTube These projects aren't broken. Just run a local invidious instance and it will work fine just like it did when invidio.us was active.

[cloudrac3r]

@ImprovedTube, please try to avoid making so many edits. You could try reading your posts carefully a couple of times before pressing send. If you have additional information to add later on, consider putting it in a separate follow-up comment. :)

[ImprovedTube]

hi @unixfox i was referring to:

• open source development for youtube: Our niche wasn't efficient in the past years/decade: i hurt seeing projects pay a ton of effort and leave still on the verge to independence and having more than enough users and donations.

• the database: The other indivious instances dont host the database. And didnt have much traffic yet.
  Indivious deserves a developer and to keep the database server.

@cloudrac3r Sure! you notice minor edits? 😳

[tuxayo]

@ImprovedTube

you notice minor edits?

I noticed this now: GitHub resend an email notification for each edit. Makes sense since GitHub allows to reply via email so one needs to somehow have the latest version otherwise that would cause confusion.

[2dopenstein]

Starting September 1st, I'm shutting down the user-facing portion of https://invidio.us and stepping away from development. You can read more here.

@Perflyst has been promoted to project owner.

There has to be software that can adapt to youtube implement I cant research atm fight tax forclosure but when I can I will do what I can to help

[MoistTowellettes]

I would like to maintain invidious all I need to do is learn crystal which I should be able to do in the coming week with a new laptop coming, in three to four weeks from now I should be able to maintain invidious.

[MoistTowellettes]

I was never getting the promised laptop because I got scammed, I have one now but I cannot use it because it's on loan and is therefore heavily restricted in what is allowed to be downloaded, sorry guys.

[elypter]

why not boot linux from an usb storage?

[MoistTowellettes]

I'll try this.

…

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