I currently use PeerTube, I like a lot about it but also it’s clumsy in someways and Federation is still mystical to be despite running a server for about 2 years. A Nostr native version would be amazing (it’s currently on the ActivityPub protocol).
I just give up with most YT stuff now but sometimes it’s the only place with instructions for things I need and I play browser roulette until I can watch, which obviously sucks.
I use freetube on my linux computers and various NewPipe versions on my phone. I don't bother with youtube itself anymore.
FreeTube has become super crappy on Mac… I do run a Linux machine too but more often I’m on Mac. Such a shame, used to work great.
Are you on the latest update? (.29, I think?)
Unlikely but I’ll give it a shot, not used for a while because it wasn’t working.
Both of these options are fine, but I still need to
- connect my device to google/youtube servers so they can track what I'm watching.
- Free-tube doesn't work more than it works for me
- Google aggressively blocks vpn IP addresses and ones it assumes are not residential IPs
- Google throttles vidoes/day and retries causing them to fail to load frequently
- if your IP gets flagged your out for a few weeks until the unban you (usually about 2 weeks for me)
- You can't watch anything flagged as 18+ which apparently many of the comedy shows I used to watch are
- Tools like ytdl and pinchflat require youtube cookies (and a youtube account) when monitoring more than like 2 channels per day practically
This doesn't account for the upload side either. As someone whos makes their own podcast 2.0 service and host it myself, would be cool to share video content as well and with as much ease as I do audio content.
Finally, like podcast 2.0 there are many apps for listening/subscribing, or I can build my own, whatever. Non of this with youtube.
Just because someone has taken the time for now to build apps to work around youtube, they still break frequently, and youtube _could_ shut them down anytime they realistically want to. I don't want to be forced to bend over for, or dance around with google to watch content from creators I want to support.
Finally, if you haven't noticed invidious is basically completely dead. In like a weekend youtube killed 99% of public instances. I've only found one that still partially works, and does so by creating and storing google cookies in your browser which breaks if you disable 3rd party cookies like I do.
Did you code something yourself for hosting PC2.0 stuff?
Had to put some stuff on hold while I build out the framework it runs on. Hoping to have another release in the coming months. Total UI overhaul :)
Yup. YouTube is going to be dead to me in the not too distant future. I am making my peace with that. It will annoy everyone and even me, but I am starting to download videos or at least audio from videos so I have the files on my own hardware.
AS for hosting, I couldn't possibly do that with the horrific upload speeds I am subject to in the wilds of Maine (at least until I decide to spring for a starlink, which is cool, but they are still changing terms and there are still not enough competitors to make it cheap), and so I keep leaning towards some kind of VPS service to handle the heavy lifting. I just don't want to pay for that in perpetuity.
So . . . if you build a client that serves the videos to a client on a 1-1 basis, that is nearly impossible to scale, which brings us back to the monetary incentives to host files, which I have yet to see work. (See IPFS and other such protocols.)
The price to host video content (youtube) is currently socialized XD, With ad's that is, because google serves ads to more than just youtube users, and uses that revenue to run youtube at a loss.
Something else worth mentioning. I currently host my media files themselves on backblaze B2. Everything else is on my metal, just not the primary media files themselves.
