There are browser extensions such as LibRedirect which will automatically, well, redirect requests to these alternatives, with extensive configurability by the user.
<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/>
YewTu.be went offline last week amidst news that Google were cracking down on YouTube viewers employing adblocking.
As to benefits of Invidious and Piped front-ends:
- No subscription required.
- Less data exposure to YouTube /Google itself.
- Lighter website / improved UI/UX.
- One small way of registering dissatisfaction to YouTube for dark patterns / user-hostile site practices.
Invidious: <https://invidious.io/> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invidious>
Piped: <https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped>
I don't use social media because I think it's a net negative in my life. However YouTube I've always justified by following lots of educational content. I've learned a lot of cool things and gained new hobbies just by watching YouTube. One day, leather-working videos popped up on my feed. Soon I was making my own stuff with leather - it was a heap of fun!
I've noticed over the past few years though, that no matter how much I try to tweak the algorithm, I'm just getting mindless junk. And shorts are the worst of it! They're deliberately designed to hook you in, so they're very hard to ignore.
And so YouTube, I have to admit, has become a net negative. Another place for mindless dopamine hits, zombifying us all. I'm so sad about it!
Anyone who says that and actually believes it is fooling themselves if they think they’re immune to strategies developed by an entire industry over the course of decades to the tune of billions of dollars.
Not a skill issue. Just the way our brains are biologically wired and people exploiting it for ad money.
People don't voluntarily pay to be treated as semi-intelligent scrolling cattle, we fall into endless scrolling unconsciously and pay with our eyeball-time, but we don't go "oh I'm gonna shell out $8 for the privilege of browsing an inferior TikTok". He's got to chose one strategy and commit to it.
I think it's a bit dramatic to jump to words like "dark pattern" just because YouTube dared to suggest some content in one place in the interface.
If anything, YouTube's Subscriptions tab is one of the most user-respecting pieces of social media out there. It only shows you your subscriptions, and it is chronological.
I'm currently still paying for premium but now it's like my cable bill. I sorta have to, but I don't feel like it's a voluntary transaction where I'm paying to get something I want. Now I'm paying to reduce about 50% of what I don't want and there is no option to get what I want at any price.
Fascinating -- I've been seriously considering cancelling mine as well, for the exact same reason.
Those shorts are a thorn in my side.
If you come from a third world country I get it, but many of us here do not. $12 is less than half an hour of work for even middle class Americans and Europeans.
I guess if you don’t even watch YouTube I don’t understand why you are even in this thread.
We had a "showdown" moment with our kids some time ago due to inability to manage device usage. Ended up with me changing the wifi password and all the kids devices permanently lost internet access at home.
The kids have been playing together - and outside! - and generally much happier ever since. Mental health definitely better. Who'd have thought it?
And during the day I occasionally leave the live stream of a stork nest running. One of them learned to fly just two days ago, and it was fun watching them getting to learn how their wings work, while they don't have much space to train [1], which makes me ask how many such livestreams exist which normally would be volatile data. I'm not sure if these live streams do get stored, but it would be a huge amount of bandwidth for almost no added value.
Then there are fun mathematics videos which show you how to solve mathematical problems [2], daring you to solve them.
Basically there's so much of value, like `the native web`, `ServeTheHome`, `Jeff Gerling`, `No Boilerplate`, `Code to the Moon`, James Briggs`, gliding, mtb-riding, windsurfing, so much quality content which is hard for a TV station to deliver.
I don't see it comparable to Reddit.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP60cspQn3N9d...
I would buy YouTube premium but I don't really want to remunerate Google for their anticompetitive business practices or their mistreatment of content creators. So I just go for patreon of channels I like.
YouTube is an endless goldmine of quality videos made by people who actually give a shit about the topic they're talking about, rather then people who are just trying to make "content" to monetize.
I also appreciate that at least some of my monthly payment goes to the people making the videos I'm watching.
I'm honestly surprised to hear such a cynical take on it.
So basically it is a way to use YouTube with a proxy server in between. Quoting directly from LibreTube (an Android app based on Piped) -
> With NewPipe, the extraction is done locally on your phone, and all the requests sent towards YouTube/Google are done directly from the network you're connected to, which doesn't use a middleman server in between. Therefore, Google can still access information such as the user's IP address. Aside from that, subscriptions can only be stored locally.
> LibreTube takes this one step further and proxies all requests via Piped (which uses the NewPipeExtractor). This prevents Google servers from accessing your IP address or any other personal data.
> Apart from that, Piped allows syncing your subscriptions between LibreTube and Piped, which can be used on desktop too.
You can also self host it or use an instance like https://piped.video/
The only real "without any reason" I'm aware of is free tier infra running on an account that hasn't upgraded to paid tenancy. "Always-Free" resources belonging to an unpaid tenancy can be deallocated without notice in order to provide resources for a paid tenancy.
There are malicious people out there (on large, official platforms as well, because moderation is fiction) that will replicate someone's social feed and then adds controversial crap/crypto scams/weird stuff in the middle of it all. Taking action against imposters is sometimes necessary.
If you're a normal Youtube channel and you find someone "ripping" your videos to Yewtube, I completely understand why someone would demand a takedown. Most people barely know how to operate a browser, let alone understand the concept of privacy preserving alternative frontends that work through local implementations of Youtube's client code.
If you're some underpaid tech support person who gets a DMCA complaint about such a mirror, I wouldn't be surprised if they decide "take down first, ask questions later" would be a safe bet.
You may think Azure is amateur hour, but it apparently does not hold a candle to OCI.
and yet this site was still using them prior to ban hammer because “it probably won’t happen to me”
I will always say this: fuck Oracle. Fuck Larry Ellison. Any person or company that uses their products despite knowing the shit the founder and company has done deserves any consequences
And that self-hosting as a fallback (if only to test backup and recovery procedures) is also highly underappreciated.
-their cloud console interface in general was bad
- the technology is pretty rudimentary: after spinning up some ec2 instances and attaching some volumes, I needed to enter some strange custom commands in the terminal to make them useful (aside of the standard partitioning and mounting)
- their cost explaining docs were worse than Amazon IMO.
- for some reason they started spamming me with Portuguese mail (maybe because my last name looks like Portuguese?)
- Somehow I cancelled my admin account but not some inner account so for some time i couldn't login but still had some volumes that were being charged... I couldn't delete them.
- I tried to spin up one of their ready made wordpress instances but it wasn't working. I've since forgotten what was the issue but at the time I found it hilarious.
Overall I wouldn't touch it for stuff related to work. Had very bad experience with them .
As far as I can tell, the site is just a youtube frontend, so it's unclear if this was some sort of pseudo-DMCA thing, or if Oracle Cloud just sometimes intentionally scorched-earths paying customers.
Cloud companies all make certain claims around bandwidth/CPU/memory/etc. on low tiers, but if you actually fully utilize the tier, they'll almost invariably make your life miserable.
Normally they won't outright boot you (this seems surprising), but your instances will suddenly always be limited to what the Cloud Company considers to be "proper" for the low tier you are paying for--which magically is always much smaller than what they advertise.
While they may in some way violate Google TOS, that is not a legal matter.
In case of piped and freetube you can subscribe to channels without Google account (freetube does that even offline), it's also possible to import channel subscriptions from Youtube.
There were instances that shortly existed, or which tried to redirect you to some suspicious sites but these were filtered out.
Some of us feel supporting Google in any way is unethical, but still want to consume some of the content they have lured people to put on their servers.
Videos can also be optionally proxied in some instances but that wasn't a draw for me.
It's up to the instance admin for Invidious and the behaviour of Piped to proxy googlevideo. Not sure if it's visible at Invidious if you use an instance that doesn't proxy the traffic, but you can be sure it's proxied when you use Piped.
And I like supporting the content creators that I watch. Rather than just freeloading.
> Error processing transaction
> We're unable to complete your sign up. Common sign up errors are due to: (a) Using prepaid cards. Oracle only accepts credit card and debit cards (b) Intentionally or unintentionally masking one's location or identity
It checks nightly for any new videos on the channel and Jellyfin sends me a notification when a new video is ready to watch.
If it's a service that's piggybacking on another site there's a good chance it'll get shut down at some point. I get the feeling the author of the post is a little naïve that this comes as a surprise, that their two accounts with Oracle were linked and banned in unison came as a surprise and there wasn't a backup.
However anyone who uses a site like this knows it's easy come/easy go. You get what you pay for and appreciate the time, effort and money the webmaster has put in and make your own arrangements to save anything of importance to your local machine.
I understand the Spartacus-cum-Anonymous message that they're going for but the language is all over the place.
Invidious can receive emails but isn't a person or business entity?
I might just as well say that Knobble@McKnees.com isn't a person contactable via the Internet, it _just is_.
The "free" movie selection is also really good (no ad's in premium). It's curated (read not endless fluff) and I spend less time thumbing through the damn menus (looking at you Netflix) and just watching stuff.
As an example YT Movies>Free just released James Cameron's Doc: Deepsea Challenge right after the Titan implosion. This type of realtime, zeitgeist curation happens all the time in their "free movie section" If you are starting from 0 in the submersible space great way to break the ice and start to grasp what that type of exploration entails. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZD_nbS1_II
Been with them since the Google Play Music days, just a happy customer.
If I come up with a clever tweet and then post it, does twitter own that data? what if i posted it to a middleware like a browser extension that then posts to twitter but also makes it accessible on an ipfs feed?
If I wanted to publish a website of your tweets, I believe I could contact you and get your permission, or I negotiate the rights through Twitter, like using their third party API.
After moving to Oracle Cloud to use their Free Tier for my personal blog, I got this email from them back in April, basically requiring me to migrate to pay-as-you-go since my blog had near zero traffic. To be fair, I'm perfectly fine with this and happy to still be billed $0 per month. But it just set the perspective that Oracle wouldn't blink an eye to kill my site off if its PMs or lawyers thought they needed to revisit a subscription plan or usage terms - and I'm not saying that it's any surprise to me.
> Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) will be reclaiming idle Always Free compute resources from Always Free customers only. Reclaiming idle resources allows OCI to efficiently provide services to Always Free customers. Your account has been identified as having one or more compute instances that have been idle for the past 7 days. These idle instances will be stopped 7 days from now. If your idle Always Free compute instance is stopped, you can restart it as long as the associated compute shape is available in your region. You can keep idle compute instances from being stopped by converting your account to Pay As You Go (PAYG). With PAYG, you will not be charged as long as your usage for all OCI resources remains within the Always Free limits.
More trouble than it's worth, imo. Was fun while it lasted.
Edit, sorry, 9 hours: https://ocistatus.oraclecloud.com/#/incidents/ocid1.oraclecl...
Maybe not the best way to judge? i.e. based on impression of other products?
People run personal projects on AWS etc.
Oracle cloud is also a lot better priced than the big 3.
Now when I read "oracle cloud", my thoughts immediately go to their horrible, gross way of doing business in DB land. Pay outrageous amounts of money for poorly specced machinery, the "you are not allowed to benchmark us" snafu, poor docs, no open source mindshare to speak of/terrible community. And I personally hate their sql dialect but that's me.
Then, you apply this feeling of grossness on the idea of them being your cloud provider. One that at the moment is not dominant, so learning how to navigate and use it is probably not that useful for your career right now. And one with, for me, a pretty shit-tier branding.
All in all I'm not surprised to learn they have a very generous free tier to lure people in.
