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.
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.
I wish I had the resources and technical knowledge to do so. I'm a broke college student
Self hosting is very easy if you're just using it on your local network.
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.
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.
Yea it's a bummer because I love LibreTubes UI compared to NewPipes outdated UI but it looks like I might have to switch to NewPipe
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.
Oh nice ! Do you know if there exists a mockup of the new UI ?
I've seen messages on a few invidious instances saying that they're having to deal with Google blocking them too
I just yesterday switched instances its good so far
