For some time, trying to watch videos on Invidious or Freetube has been a pain. It has been oscillating day by day but now I get like 3 seconds of video for 8 seconds of loading time
Some days ago I saw a notice on top of the webpage in some Invidious instances stating something like "Youtube is trying to impede frontends"
Today i tried going to youtube.com and enabling some requests on uBO and videos loading freakin' fast
Is anyone getting the same?
I came across this type of comment a lot in the past and want to elaborate on this further for context.
Public instances draw a lot of eyeballs and the tech companies go after them. Private instances are less impactful and get left alone.
I really can't overstate how miserable my video watching experience was becoming prior to self-hosting. I jumped from Piped -> Invidious -> PipedMaterial over the span of a few months as the best instances started to crap out. I used libredirect and regularly cycled through instances w/ the keyboard shortcut to find a easily watchable video.
Eventually, I bit the bullet and self-hosted a docker container of Invidious and it's like night and day. Everything just works, and you can program libredirect so that it operates as if it were a public instance.
In my experience, a lot of public instances initially work perfectly, and then get targeted and hamstrung by big tech. I think of them less as solutions and more as demos to use until things get buggy. I have had the same experience w/ teddit and searxng.