Things will continue normally until they can’t anymore. Assume it’s just the start. Assume they’ll ask GitHub to takedown the repos (if so go to our Gitea https://gitea.invidious.io/iv-org ). Assume the team wont be able to work on Invidious. You know what you have to do. May Invidious live and prosper, with, or without us.
Hopefully this doesn’t progress further to where Invidious gets taken down.
If you value the project you can make a donation here: Donate - Invidious
This really sucks! I’ve been loosely planning an upcoming video to cover how dependent people are on Google in light of the recent aurora drama, even when people think they are de-googled. Anything that proxies to Google platforms like Aurora and invidious are always going to be temporary and risky solutions. This is why at least for us at Techlore we upload to dedicated platforms and make sure we always have places that are actually degoogled. I really wish more people did this.
We’re just going after all the third-party front-ends this week, are we.
sad news but hopefully this serves as a wake-up call for some…!
I have a question. Some instances of Invidious and Piped have onion links. Are those gonna be taken down as well or will those be able to work?
Google is blocking Invidious from connecting to YouTube, not people from connecting to Invidious, so anti-censorship technologies like .onion domains aren’t really going to help here I wouldn’t think.
Maybe the only benefit to hidden Invidious instances is that they’ll be so low-traffic they’ll fly under the radar, but I somewhat doubt it.
With the latest Twitter, Reddit, YouTube news now, I’m kind of convinced that we are at the end of the “golden era” of big tech companies letting people use their services however they please. I think we’re going to see a rise of being forced to use first-party apps to access proprietary social networks, and also a rise of smaller federated and decentralized alternatives.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the alternatives will ever reach the same levels of active users as the centralized platforms they want to replace, but I also think that’s somewhat by design. I think that we’re entering a new era marked by a resurgence of internet forums and smaller open networks, which will not ever approach the same size as Reddit or Facebook, but will also be home to much higher quality discussions and communities which the Web 2.0 social media companies never really achieved. Honestly, the death of social media might not be so bad after all 
Oh, I definitely don’t think this is the start of the end for social media. I think the folks who use these alternate front-ends will just start using the official app, or use the browser. Which, for the platform is a win-win. Even more so if adblocking is killed. Either via some kind of site block, or services forcing them from the browser web stores. The way things are going, I could definitely see Google do this (to their own store). People might boycott, but they’ll come back. We might see some conversions to more decentralised platforms, but I don’t (for the foreseeable future) see them taking over in a big way.
At best, In the short term, we’ll see more fragmentation. Though, eventually people will come back to the bigger platforms, because that’s where everyone (people and brands/companies) is.
The only way I could ever see this change is if a generational shift deems a different platform to be better. What’s essentially what happened with the Tick-tock platform. Which leads us to education, to promote more open platforms.
Hopefully everything goes right. I use Invidious a lot.
Yep! To be honest though nothing is safe as long as it still involves connecting with Google. This includes Aurora, NewPipe, piped, Discord music bots, etc.) These are all just proxies.
I think there will always be underground tools for niche communities, but the moment anything gets enough traction Google will surely cut off supply.
We need to move to more independent platforms altogether 
The Web 3.0 happened a while back for me. I’m just pirating as much as I can before we are back using BBS.
Getting my close circle on Signal was already a gargantuan effort. Probably gonna be a lot more difficult to get them to use Mastodon, etc.
For people to get off such big social media platforms, privacy scandals aren’t going to be enough. The overall experience has to be either worse than or bested by those independent platforms, so fingers crossed.
The optimist in me does wish for a “takeback” of the internet. I’ve been spending more time on this forum, and I think it’s fantastic. (Would others outside agree? I don’t know, I don’t think so.)
At least we still have Piped
Ever since learning of the invidious news, I’ve been thinking about how this will apply to Piped. It is still somewhat unclear how exposed and vulnerable Invidious is, but I wonder how similar or different a position Piped is in (legally or technically).
This is not a great year for 3rd party apps and frontends (First Twitter, then Reddit, now Youtube).
Long term we need alternative platforms to the big tech equivalents that are easy to use and fun and user respecting/private.
Short term I think we need tools to help ease that transition (tools for both content creators and content consumers), because its really hard to bootstrap a platform or social network from nothing, new VC funded for profit platforms struggle and usually fail to succeed at that, it is exponentially harder for a not-for-profit and/or federated community driven platform to compete.
Newpipe is a small example of the sort of bridging tools I’m speaking about which make the transition from well established platforms to new ones easier. Its best known as a privacy friendly android app for youtube but it integrates both youtube and peertube into a single app in a way that is more convenient (but still definitely a work in progress)
