
Stepping away from open source - vuldin
https://omar.yt/posts/stepping-away-from-open-source
======
alexellisuk
"Invidious is an alternative front-end to YouTube" \- TIL. Running an open
source project can be exhausting, and a thankless task, almost all of the
time. An active community and user-base helps, but it seems like omarroth has
come to the end of the road.

As the maintainer of a relatively large OSS platform (OpenFaaS), I also wrote
up about this last year too. For anyone who can't relate to omarroth's
statement, it might help with perspective:
[https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-
leadership/](https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-leadership/)

~~~
gavinray
You are an absolute machine of a human and a wonder to behold. Keep being
awesome.

------
svnpenn
Note that [https://invidio.us](https://invidio.us) is not the only instance,
just the most popular one. You can host your own, or use one of the others:

[https://instances.invidio.us](https://instances.invidio.us)

~~~
pmontra
Repository at [https://github.com/iv-org/invidious](https://github.com/iv-
org/invidious)

It's written in Crystal.

------
gavinray
For anyone unfamiliar, Invidious is just Youtube without ads and it lets you
turn the screen off on mobile. It also lets you turn videos to an "audio only"
mode for speed/bandwidth.

It's a viable alternative to Spotify IMO as one use.

It's basically free Youtube Red. Really sad to hear this, hope the creator is
better off for it though.

~~~
dgellow
Sounds like a neat way to use Youtube without being tracked by Google
analytics. I guess that's the next project I will try to run on my Raspberry
Pi :)

~~~
cerberusss
YouTube tracks you regardless, if I understand correctly. For instance, if you
search on DuckDuckGo and there's a YouTube video in the results, you can play
it right there. However, DuckDuckGo warns you that you'll be tracked.

------
qqii
Here is the github issue thread: [https://github.com/iv-
org/invidious/issues/1320](https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/1320)

Hopefully the community will pick it up and continue development. Projects
like invidious, nitter and bibliogram have turned clicking youtube, twitter
and instagram links into something I actively avoid (especially twitter which
for which some thing's always gone wrong and I have to refresh) to being a joy
to browse again.

------
zizee
I hadn't heard of invidious before, and it's not clear what it is when
visiting Invidio.us. so for others that are curious:

[https://github.com/iv-org/invidious](https://github.com/iv-org/invidious)

> Invidious is an alternative front-end to YouTube

------
glenstein
Invidious is such a treasure and something I do not want to see go by the
wayside. I would like to think, for whoever is available to work on the
project with the time in energy, there could be enough support to keep this
going via donations.

~~~
ZinniaZirconium
There have been other alternatives in the past and there will be other
alternatives in the future. I've found the most reliable option is to run my
own and not rely on someone else's service which can break at any time and
disappear at any time.

Interfacing with YouTube in any unofficial way is fraught with peril by its
very nature because YouTube is always trying to stop it.

~~~
glenstein
I'm glad that we have the option to self-host, and would be curious to learn
more if you have other self-hosted youtube frontend options. As it stands now
I think if invidious isn't maintained it will likely break soon. Newpipe
breaks every other week and it's actively maintained.

Invidious I found to be uniquely and particularly convenient because, for a
while at least, it ran like any other website and I could skip the steps
needed to self host.

~~~
ZinniaZirconium
There's also this which includes a frontend:

[https://github.com/Athlon1600/youtube-
downloader](https://github.com/Athlon1600/youtube-downloader)

I'm unaffiliated but I like to follow this particular project when I want to
know if others are having the same trouble with YouTube when things break for
me. I only ever implemented a backend myself when I chose to self host.

------
surround
I think the original title, “Stepping away from open source,” works better
here.

------
notdiaphone
What struck me is this:

> I can't help shake the feeling that somewhere, the software I use is being
> developed solely by volunteers who would rather quit, but don't have the
> ability to say "no".

I've witnessed a number of developers similarly burn out in the last years.
This suggest either the opensource movement attracts people prone to such
burn-outs or that it produces them. The general reaction tends to be a bit of
sympathy mixed with a hard-nosed "Well, it's difficult. Some make it, some
don't" attitude. Yet given the trend we seem to ignore a fundamental flaw in
how we're working, interacting, consuming, supporting, and rewarding one
another. Even Shuttleworth cited a kind of opensource community fatigue when
he killed off the phone project. It disappoints me to think that the
opensource world talks a lot about freedom at the same time we have Omar's
suggestion that those working in it really are not free.

~~~
hinkley
This is a risk of volunteerism in general. I think this is why you often see
age gaps in organizations. You have a lot of young people who can’t pace
themselves, and 3/4 of those who decide to stick around are gone in 2 years. I
suspect that it’s a small but not insignificant contribution to young people
moving somewhere else and starting over. I just need a change of pace...

Someone just a couple years ago wrote up an opinion piece in which they
asserted that the standard oath for volunteers should be “I promise not to
burn out”.

------
grugagag
Im sad to see invideo.us go, I was a casual user and loved the simplicity of
it. But the reality is that open source goodwill projects have a cost in
resources and free cannot really survive as free in the long term, whoever is
maintaining the software has a life and bills.

------
tdeck
Can someone explain what this did? I visited the site but it just seems to be
a random collection of videos.

~~~
Shared404
It's an alternative front end for YouTube. A rather nice one at that.

------
mindcrash
Any chance of donating the domain to the community? I think we can take care
of hosting :(

------
Acrobatic_Road
The main instances are so unreliable that I just run my own.

~~~
djeiasbsbo
I have never had problems with the instance from
[https://snopyta.org](https://snopyta.org).

They seem to host a lot of other services as well, such as searx, nitter and
bibliogram. I mainly use their searx instance and it is my primary search
provider.

They also have hidden .onion instances iirc.

------
ZinniaZirconium
Oh that's a shame.

> The API will continue to function until October 1st, to give time for any
> services relying on it to migrate to other solutions.

Aw no. I was thinking about using invidio.us in my own projects but now I
guess I won't!

I have need of a YouTube streaming server, backend only, which I can embed on
a web page. I made my own with youtubedown and bash but maintaining it is a
pain since YouTube is always changing ciphers and also I forked youtubedown
which means I need to adapt my changes to new versions when I upgrade.

So I was thinking of ditching my own and adopting an existing service. Trouble
is existing services tend to stop existing. I made my own YouTube streaming
server in the first place because I was using HMA YouTube proxy which was
always breaking.

So this is a great reminder to me to keep maintaining my own YouTube streaming
server.

[I'm using a different VPN today! Is it IP banned?! I don't know. Will this
comment be [dead] on arrival?? I don't know!!]

~~~
djeiasbsbo
There are many alternative instances, that's the great thing about projects
like invidious.

[https://instances.invidio.us](https://instances.invidio.us)

For your own projects, I would recommend relying on multiple instances anyway
because if one has downtime you could just use another one.

~~~
ZinniaZirconium
Yes except the whole invidious project is rapidly being abandoned according to
discussion on GitHub. The next breaking change in YouTube could break
invidious forever if the project is unmaintained.

I just need to remember not to be lazy and to continue maintaining my fork of
youtubedown. The only obstacle for me is I really don't use YouTube frequently
so mostly it's a matter of remembering to do the necessary maintenance.

