Piped/Invidious

Are others having issues? Can't look up anything on Piped. Can't watch anything on Invidious. Are they degraded? They were working fine before.

Unfortunately

I don't know if there are more recent news.
Some instances seem to be still mistereously working, but it's a hard time ...

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Basically the instances we used to provide are currently redirecting to other instances to recover from a ratelimit.

That being said, I tried deploying them on another server yesterday and the "throttled" errors kept reoccurring nevertheless. I'm unsure whether there is something else being used to track instances other than the IP :thinking: all in all, certainly a very dire situation. Nevertheless, the plan is to bring them back online as soon as possible.

@filo for most instances, changing the IP used to access YouTube servers seems to have done the job, here however it did not. Reasons for this are still unclear :confused:

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I can only guess that Cloudflare is aware its being used in some way for Garuda’s Youtube offerings?
Could be why that even changing the IP it still isn’t working? I know it isn’t effecting all instances using Cloudflare, but maybe they are not aware of the lesser used/publicized instances?
Doing a search about prior legal issues with youtube related things and Cloudflare’s actions before, I can only guess that it could be a factor? I apologize in advance if I am totally off the mark here. I am trying my best to wrap my head around these issues here.

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a lot of instances are still working. https://y.com.sb for example.

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Yes, a good amount are still up and working.
Anybody else looking for instances, I highly recommend using the browser add-on LibRedirect as it has a good list of instances (using various frontends) to check and ping easily from within its settings (don't have to ping one at a time either; can ping a list). I've found a good Piped instance to use in the meantime this way with a low ping (which is not usually the easiest thing for me to find given my location; sometimes other countries give me far better ping :laughing: )

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https://api.invidious.io/

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The URL used to proxy the streams not orange-clouded, therefore no actual video content is delivered through Cloudflare. I guess you were referring to this part of their policy?

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Yes, in a way. More of what they might be bound to do. Not sure if it applies (or will), but long post in drop down:

legal stuff

I have kind of doubt that this is related to the core issue here (or that Cloudflare will act in such a way), but even if there is a slight chance it could be related and wanted to state my reasoning considering this isn’t the only time Cloudflare was involved with Youtube related matters.

There is a C&D with Invidious, with most likely more legal action going forward as Invidious seems to want to fight it, so there might be chance Cloudflare might feel forced to “play it safe”. There are a few past issues that make me think that it might be the case. Of course those other past issues were with its CDN services (I see a few things about hosting youtube-dl in the past).
Even if it isn’t using its CDN, they could be pressured by a giant like Youtube and trying to play it safe.

Again, just going from what I see out there… but since Youtube seems to be overreaching as its claiming Invidious is uses its API (even though it does not and uses its own API instead) , I can see why something like Cloudflare would play it safe even if it was seen as an unnecessary preemptive measure if the C&D was to be properly challenged toward Invidious (and hopefully won by Invidious because they sound like they are going to be serious about going forward protecting their rights if they have to).
Just going off past patterns and the increasingly more corporate overreach, and Cloudflare has to deal with US law (its based in the US at that). C&D have been abused a ton lately, even if the company knows it doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on.
I won’t speculate on any more about it because it is hard to be sure as Cloudflare can say nothing about it even if it is the case if they want.
Legal crap like this can be so needlessly messy and I hate to see it :weary:
Glad I’ve only worked on lawyers’ PCs and never actually worked for a firm :laughing:

Getting more at the problem at hand:

I did see your post at Pipe’s issue tracker earlier about throttling (even though its now “closed”) https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/issues/2487
I am not sure if it is related, but I did notice a few different things happening with uMatrix (browser addon which you can filter a lot of page resources per domain) when these issues were first happening. I had add things for Cloudflare that I didn’t before. By any chance did you add additional Cloudflare features? If not, that is weird that it would happen all of a sudden; looked like DDoS checks (the typical “click this box” Cloudflare thing). :thinking:

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Meanwhile, a new option has cropped up:

Good on them, the more the merrier I say. It looks decent too, and seems fast.

More info, including self-hosted options:

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I use FreeTube, still works. Several versions available in the repos, but the one that works for me is Freetube-git from AUR.

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If this is true, these are very dark times :frowning:

Edit: indeed, this has some publicity..

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