What has been happening to Piped (YouTube Frontend)?
I use LibreTube and it looks like half of the instances keep getting shut down and then get back up, and the speeds for all are atrociously slow that it is just better to watch it on YouTube on Firefox. I heard a while ago YouTube was blocking certain Piped instances but do not know if that is the same case right now.
It’s a cat and mouse game with Google blocking the Piped proxy IP address of popular instances, and then those instances getting a new IP to use for it.
Solution is to use smaller instances or self host your own small/private instance, issue with that solution is that then the small instances become popular and the cycle continues.
On mobile some apps like LibreTube can disable the piped proxy and make a direct connection instead (which also lets Google see your IP), but I don’t know any way to disable piped proxy for public instances on PC
I think the documentation by default doesn’t federate your instance so a private instance should be as accessible as your capabilities to get it up and running.
What makes this extra confusing to me, is that this doesn’t seem to happen to the same extent for Invidious instances. I’ve only needed to swap between two instances on Clipious, whereas on LibreTube I was hopping across their entire instance list and sometimes not finding even one working instance.
If it helps, the NewPipe developers have been working on a full rewrite of the app, but I don’t know when it will come out.
That said, I would probably use invidious in browsers. I haven’t really had any problems with it whereas I’ve had nothing but issues with Piped for months.
It seems like on Invidious, the default setting is to still have the end user load the video directly from YouTube, whereas Piped defaults to proxying the video through its server as well. I would imagine this makes Piped servers a lot more noticable to YouTube.
I bet for the owners of public instances, it must be a constant fight against YouTube’s IP banning or rate limiting.
If you have the resources, you could self-host your own private instance for you and your friends or family. I haven’t had performance issue with my private instance so far.
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