Bonum Certa Men Certa

YouTube (Google/Alphabet Agency) Treating People Who Obstruct Dangerous Ads (or JavaScript) Like 'Pirates'

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 21, 2024

Window pane closed with two layers of metal barricades.

Now a 3-strikes system! This is another escalation (compare to prior screenshots). The tone is getting increasingly hostile.

Video player will be blocked after 3 videos

They've put me on notice. Invidious is meanwhile under another kind of crackdown (inv.nadeko.net and invidious.nerdvpn.de are still mostly functional) and one person explained it in Geminispace a couple of days ago:

Comments on the future of the Invidious project

It's currently broken on my instance because of Google blocking the use of the API to by-pass the ads. From what I understand, it's a bit of an arms race between the Invidious developers circumventing the Google blocks and Google catching on and imposing more restrictions. I'm not sure about the future of the project. Hosting an Invidious instance, and keeping in line with the requirements to remain an official instance recommended by the project in their instances liste, heavily relies on Docker workflows, so it might not be feasible for me to get it running on FreeBSD and continue to satisfy those requirements. I don't think it's worth running an instance until a more permanent solution to the Google blocking problem is found, anyway.

See the first link below, which is an issue reported on the Invidious GitHub repo, for more information on what's going on with it. Every time there is a fix, a new problem pops up that breaks Invidious instances. The final comment by unixfox (Invidious developer) on the aforementioned GitHub issue was the last straw for me. Previous fixes require using and depending on a bunch of hacky tools from the developers that aren't guaranteed to be long-term solutions. I very much appreciate the time the devs have put into the project. I really, really hate Google's unrelenting mission to break the fixes in order to maintain their ad-driven monopoly on video content. YouTube is just too popular to fail at this point, and Google will never let it fail. The only way forward that I can see from here is just to promote PeerTube in the fediverse or other FOSS video hosting alternatives.

I do not honestly expect inv.nadeko.net and invidious.nerdvpn.de to last much longer (those are fairly new Invidious instances and not widely known ones). That's why Free software events ought to quit uploading exclusively to YouTube.

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