Very Few Invidious Instances Still Work (for Video Playback)
Google has sabotaged Invidious
Over at the sister site, which has just mentioned a maintenance window that will affect us as well, I published several dozens of Invidious links. At the moment I can locate barely two - maybe just one - reliable and responsive Invidious instances that still work. This problem was mentioned here 3 days ago after it had started 4 days ago. People reported it in IRC, my wife noticed it, and so did I. Something had gone amiss.
Looking at the Invidious project for clues, the latest 'bug report' isn't related to it and 'tickets' typically devoted to this issue are dormant, so there's no solution in the making (unless YouTube loosens its restrictions).
Going to invidious.io, we have:
Invidious instances as per the official site: (there are other live lists)
Out of these, only 3 work at this time (some are very slow, due to the load they've 'inherited' perhaps).
Those are:
2. https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/
3. https://invidious.nerdvpn.de/
Almost all the instances below are 'broken'
Maybe Google did not entirely kill off Invidious, but it made Invidious a lot less reliable and usually quite slow/laggy/low-res - hence occasionally intolerable to use (even the proprietary YouTube interface seems tolerable in comparison).
Judging by this latest article from Dedoimedo, it is definitely time to abandon YouTube and stop uploading to it. As Dedoimedo (Igor) explains: "Recently, I uploaded a new video to my Youtube channel. When I tried to add a description to the clip, Youtube wouldn't let me proceed to the next step. First, it told me I cannot use angled brackets, which is fine. Then, it told me that if I wanted to use URLs (to my own blog no less), I needed to verify myself. What.
"And so I explored this venue a bit more, decided not to play ball with this nonsense, and removed the links from the description. But I also decided to write an article about this pointless experience, about this tiered reward conditioning mechanism. It highlights oh-so many things wrong with the whole modern media industry, and I want to express myself."
Get a load of this:
Conclusion further down: "The sad part is, there's no good alternative to Youtube. There are some, but they are merely trying to be the next Youtube. At the end of the day, it's the same MBA-flavored model of greed, just with different wording and style. I can't blame them for trying to make money, but from a user perspective, at the end of the day, it comes down to the same thing. A nice new platform will be born, users will flock to it, it will get bought (acquired in corpo parlance), ruined by the corpo-drones, and repeat."
Why not self-host his videos? For practical reasons this is doable. He can host these as long as he wants to and without signing some TOS. █