YouTube tries to take-down FOSS Invidious

[kilésengati]

For those that don't know, Invidious is an alternative, free and open-source API for viewing YouTube videos without ads and what not. YouTube has been on a war-path with ad-blockers recently. I think Louis Rossmann does pretty well at giving his two cents to the situation:

https://youtu.be/PTmZv7-eMrE

Maybe SomeOrdinaryGamers, Mental Outlaw or others will release videos about this too, who knows.

Here is something interesting. The music industry tried something similar to the program youtube-dl a while back, but ultimately lost in court, and now go after the project's website's hoster. I'm no legal expert, but the way I understand the ruling in favour of youtube-dl was made since creating private security copies without re-distributing them is legal in Germany as long as no DRM is circumvented and YouTube as of now doesn't employ any DRM.

Now, I'm no legal expert, so I don't know the intricates, but going after a FOSS project is futile in principle. For every take-down there are a dozen forks - in particular with such prominent projects. This is not a threat or endorsement, just my observation and the way I see these corpos not living at the pulse of time.

What's evermore concerning is, that should YouTube and the other media corpos finally understand what FOSS is, could they end up going after their users?
Could there be a new Abmahnwelle looming?


What do you think of alternative YouTube players and APIs? Do you use them?

[Kamiyama]

Youtube can't win this. I'm still watching youtube videos without ads. They will fight hard to shut 1 app down and 10 more will pop up that do the same thing. They will fight hard to shut invidious down, and 10 more websites will pop up that do the same thing.

The era of cable and forced streaming of ads to your TV is dead. Nobody is paying for that anymore. The new era is steaming services with content you like and pay for, and we can decide what content is displayed on our screen. Nobody can force you to watch ads on your own device.

If youtube wants to stay in business they will need quality content behind a paywall that people are willing to fork over $ for.

How many purges have there been now? I've watched multiple youtubers I like leave to different platforms. Right now I'm subscribed to the Corbett Report https://www.corbettreport.com but I'm not subscribed to youtube premium. Youtube banned him from their platform, so he started his own website and uploads his videos to multiple different streaming services. Sucks to be youtube.

I think in the future, youtube will have less influence, less streamers, less users, and will make less money. They walked down the path of censorship and it's already biting them in the ass.

[Kamiyama]

Funny that youtube won't let James Corbett talk politics and conspiracy theories but it still hosts naked yoga videos, many of which still aren't age restricted.

Apparently google thinks children must be protected from conservative ideas, but not nudity.

[krag hag]

Same is happening to nitter and libreddit

[Electric Cupcake]

Never heard of that one.

Aside from hardened Firefox, I've only used Newpipe.

And yt-dlp forks, of course.

[kilésengati]

Originally posted by Erin:

Same is happening to nitter and libreddit

Well, at least there's Mastodon, Lemmy and Raddle.

For YouTube, there aren't many alternatives. Odysee and PeerTube are P2P-based, which is problematic in certain countries.

[Kamiyama]

I use looptube.io a lot for music videos. It will auto repeat the same song forever with no pop-ups or distractions.

[Dracoco OwO]

Originally posted by Kamiyama:

I use looptube.io a lot for music videos. It will auto repeat the same song forever with no pop-ups or distractions.

Based.

[nullpo]

Personally I youtube is in the right this time. You're essentially not paying for their services (your payment is either the ads or youtube premium). Yet I also agree with the futility. I think youtube although in the right, should let them be. Because there are still many who don't use adblocker, and giving exposure to one of many adblocker only increase that number.