I operate an invidious instance. Google has really cracked down the past two weeks on YouTube front ends. Its extremely frustrating.

Invidious devs are finalizing a workaround so hopefully things will be working again in the next week or two.

Seems to be a big crackdown lately. Freetube and Grayjay are the only apps that seem to consistently work.

google has been blocking any IP that uses lots of youtube bandwidth, and that means any public instance needs to do IP rotation.

I also heard they began blocking all IPs belonging to some cloud providers.

I run my own invidious instance from my home servr. Only I use it, so it’ll never be blocked, but I don’t have the same anonymity as if using a public instance…

It’s mostly for the benefits of using youtube ad-free without a google account, while having local bookmarks, watch-later, and subscription feed. If that’s your main goal Invidious is really easy to set-up.

Same discussion from 4 days ago with the link to the respective Github issue: https://lemmy.ml/post/18936433

Sometimes you can find an instance that works but you have to go through a lot of them and it may only work for a few minutes or even less. Invidious doesn’t work at all for me. I hope they find a workaround because I already started committing a very serious crime against my freedom by visiting youtube.com

Now I’ve tried almost all of them in the Piped instances list (Several domain name for sale and server not found errors) and only the smnz.de one works for me. :( I am wondering whether a freshly installed self-hosted private Piped video instance will work fine.

It is not IP blacklist by Google. Seems like YouTube can now detect NewPipe extractor.

The instances list is not up to date :

• List of instances : https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped/wiki/Instances But after trying maybe more than 10 of them I found one which manages to play a video :

https://piped.smnz.de/watch?v=bBhDWTZDH9c

There’s probably more working instances.

Plan B : I guess running your own Piped instance and not sharing it with a lot of people could be worth considering.

Personally I’m sticking to https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Yt-dlp#Faster_downloads for the video downloading I do.

I started using grayjay and although it still gets blocked sometimes restarting the app usually works

Same problem here is there any other solutions for iOS?

I dont know if can help but if you search the direct server to a specific instance maybe can jump the problem. For example: lunar.icu instance can work if you search piped.lunar.icu or kavin.rocks instance by piped.kavin.rocks. Sometimes if the instance work can be useful