The State of Invidious
FOR THE past couple of weeks it was nearly impossible to find any working Invidious instances other than inv.nadeko.net, which is based in Chile (or hosted from Chile) and has serious capacity issues, probably because it is "last man standing..." (hence, exceptionally high 'demand')
Gone are the days of TinyOGG and other mechanisms of de-Googling YouTube. unixfox was still 'fighting windmills' last week, so can Invidious somehow make a future comeback, owing to new hacks/workarounds?
It's not a secret that Google/Alphabet/YouTube is deliberately cracking down on Invidious and anything else like it.
Invidious isn't just about avoiding surveillance, bloat, ads etc. It's about accessibility, Free software, and a sense of control over the video/s one watches (assuming they have not been suppressed/censored already, upstream at the hosting platform).
We don't know how much longer Invidious can survive. The software itself will continue to exist (Invidious is Free software), but if it does not work in practice because the APIs are broken or because VPNs no longer help bypass blocklists/blacklists, then what good is it? It's at risk of becoming a digital relic.
Currently, the following 3 instances are shown as options, but only the one in the middle works.
It has been the same for days if not weeks.
Free software is under attack. Free software users are under attack. Then again, they always have been. They need to fight back. At the very least, slowing down the "Dark Forces" is feasible. For now, thankfully, we still have a way of using YouTube by proxy, via inv.nadeko.net. █