17 ms·

Why yewtu.be was down: Data loss after being shut down by Oracle Cloud

226 points by nouryqt 3y ago

hedora 3y ago
It's interesting that they had two different accounts specifically in case one got borked, and then Oracle simultaneously closed both without warning. As far as I can tell, the site is just a youtube frontend, so it's unclear if this was some sort of pseudo-DMCA thing, or if Oracle Cloud just sometimes intentionally scorched-earths paying customers.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  Projects like this usually run off of Oracle cloud to take advantage of the free tier. Reclamation of resources on the free tier is not unheard of, especially if abuse or high resource usage is detected, and other cloud providers like AWS will do it too.
  - re-thc 3y ago
    It's sort of the opposite. If you're on a free account with free tier and under utilize resources below a certain threshold it may get reclaimed after a while.
    - ipaddr 3y ago
      It's both. Create a server but never login it will be reclaimed. Try to use that 10T up and the account will be banned.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- CydeWeys 3y ago
  It was probably easy for Oracle to identify that both accounts were being used to serve this site of questionable legality. And having multiple accounts is probably against Oracle's ToS anyway.
  - RajT88 3y ago
    AFAIK there is nothing illegal about YouTube frontend sites. While they may in some way violate Google TOS, that is not a legal matter.
    - qingcharles 3y ago
      In the United States violating the TOS of a web site is technically a criminal offense under the CFAA, although the government is choosing currently not to prosecute most of these offenses[0]; but beware as that is simply a policy that can be ignored at any time it is useful. [0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-announces-new-policy-charging-cases-under-computer-fraud-and-abuse-act https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-announces-...
- bsder 3y ago
  It was almost certainly over-utilization of a low revenue tier that did it. Cloud companies all make certain claims around bandwidth/CPU/memory/etc. on low tiers, but if you actually fully utilize the tier, they'll almost invariably make your life miserable. Normally they won't outright boot you (this seems surprising), but your instances will suddenly always be limited to what the Cloud Company considers to be "proper" for the low tier you are paying for--which magically is always much smaller than what they advertise.
Tomte 3y ago
[flagged]
- chmod775 3y ago
  There's a real https://jewtube.com/ https://jewtube.com/ and it's definitely not racist.
  - boondoggle16 3y ago
    There's also goyimtv but that one is definitely racist.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- anamexis 3y ago
  It rhymes with youtube in English orthography, that's literally it
isoprophlex 3y ago
Whoa, "Oracle Cloud", i have no experience with their services, but judging from their enterprise products that sounds like the grossest possible thing to run a personal project on...
- nisa 3y ago
  It's very likely that they just used two free-tier instances for this and Oracle discovered that and it's against their ToS (creating multiple free-tier instances).
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- creatonez 3y ago
  The reason they are gaining traction among hobbyists is their enormously generous free tier, where you get a 4x vCPU / 24 GiB ARM Ampere VPS and get to keep it as long as there is traffic and CPU usage.
  - perceptronas 3y ago
    Thanks for sharing. It does sound almost too good to be true. I'll check it out
    - isp 3y ago
      Setup details from a user of the Oracle Cloud "Always Free" tier: https://ryanharrison.co.uk/2023/01/28/oracle-cloud-free-server.html https://ryanharrison.co.uk/2023/01/28/oracle-cloud-free-serv... Disclaimer: I haven't tried this out myself. I found this blog post a few days ago when I first heard about the generous Oracle Cloud free tier.
      - martinsnow 3y ago
        Wow. Wonder how long it will last?
srmarm 3y ago
I'm not really sure what the site does, looks like a cleanly designed proxy for youtube? If it's a service that's piggybacking on another site there's a good chance it'll get shut down at some point. I get the feeling the author of the post is a little naïve that this comes as a surprise, that their two accounts with Oracle were linked and banned in unison came as a surprise and there wasn't a backup. However anyone who uses a site like this knows it's easy come/easy go. You get what you pay for and appreciate the time, effort and money the webmaster has put in and make your own arrangements to save anything of importance to your local machine.
- MallocVoidstar 3y ago
  It's an invidious instance: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious https://github.com/iv-org/invidious (actually https://github.com/yewtudotbe/invidious-custom https://github.com/yewtudotbe/invidious-custom since it has some custom patches)
- supriyo-biswas 3y ago
  These are Invidious instances[1], which proxy Youtube content for privacy reasons, though the project is having some legal troubles right now[2]. [1] https://invidious.io https://invidious.io [2] https://blog.thefrenchghosty.me/posts/im-not-invidious/ https://blog.thefrenchghosty.me/posts/im-not-invidious/
  - KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
    That second link, the blog post, is very weird. I understand the Spartacus-cum-Anonymous message that they're going for but the language is all over the place. Invidious can receive emails but isn't a person or business entity? I might just as well say that Knobble@McKnees.com isn't a person contactable via the Internet, it _just is_.
    - supriyo-biswas 3y ago
      I agree it's a weird way to defend a C&D; it was discussed on HN previously[1] with many commenters pointing out the same. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36262722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36262722
nisa 3y ago
What is the appeal from these YouTube frontends? I came to really dislike them because links are broken after a while because these sites don't live very long and the video data itself is still streamed by YouTube? I don't get it.
- MallocVoidstar 3y ago
  I run a Piped instance on a VPS for myself. It's not linked to my Google account or my home IP (from Alphabet's perspective) in any way. I like giving Alphabet less info about my behavior.
  - pantulis 3y ago
    But then... aren't you missing recommendations and suggested videos? Honest question, I'd say Youtube is half as useful without that.
    - TheBozzCL 3y ago
      It does provide basic recommendations based on the video you’re currently watching. If you only care about the channels you’re subscribed to, it’s a much better experience.
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      YouTube will make recommendations based on your immediate session's viewing history, even without an account. A tremendous advantage to viewing without authenticating is that you can quickly set a strong affinity based on your current interests, and don't have to live with consequences of viewing low-quality content for hours, days, months, years, millennia, etc. If Invidious and Piped offer(ed) the option to permabam channels as well (to those subscribing directly to those services, or even within a single session), so much the better.
    - toast0 3y ago
      Youtube without recommendations and suggested videos is a whole lot easier to get in and get out, without getting hooked into watching one more thing.
pierat 3y ago
[flagged]
dredmorbius 3y ago
For those not familiar with it, yewtu.be is an Invididous instance, where Invidious is an alternate front-end to YouTube, similar in spirit to Nitter (Twitter), Teddit (Reddit), the late Bibliogram (InstagramProxiTok, and more. Another YouTube front-end is Piped. It's possible to use public instances of many of these, or to self-host your own. There are browser extensions such as LibRedirect which will automatically, well, redirect requests to these alternatives, with extensive configurability by the user. <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/> YewTu.be went offline last week amidst news that Google were cracking down on YouTube viewers employing adblocking. As to benefits of Invidious and Piped front-ends: - No subscription required. - Less data exposure to YouTube /Google itself. - Lighter website / improved UI/UX. - One small way of registering dissatisfaction to YouTube for dark patterns / user-hostile site practices. Invidious: <https://invidious.io/ https://invidious.io/> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invidious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invidious> Piped: <https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped>
- gymbeaux 3y ago
  It’s cute that Google thinks we’re all going to pay for YouTube Premium/TV instead of just not watching YouTube. That’s where I’m at. I don’t watch anything on YouTube anymore, and like when Reddit got “smart” and drove me away, I’ve noticed my mental health improve.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - bosch_mind 3y ago
    Same here! The UX is so bad on both I just can’t use either. Not hard to quit when usability sucks and I find other things to do… like read or go outside.
  - lacrimacida 3y ago
    In the same boat here. But they couldn’t care less, the masses is what they’re after. I came to and been using invidio.us to listen to lectures without any video, a feture that works on Iphones with the screen turned off. Not sure whether apple or google are the ones who don’t allow for that.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
xyst 3y ago
> It is known that this provider will randomly ban accounts without any reason. and yet this site was still using them prior to ban hammer because “it probably won’t happen to me” I will always say this: fuck Oracle. Fuck Larry Ellison. Any person or company that uses their products despite knowing the shit the founder and company has done deserves any consequences
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Another lesson is that "multi-cloud" should mean "multi cloud-provider", if you're going to go that way. And that self-hosting as a fallback (if only to test backup and recovery procedures) is also highly underappreciated.
  - hnlmorg 3y ago
    I do love the ideal of multi-cloud in theory but the practicalities aren’t so simple. It’s hard enough for businesses to pull it off, let alone someone who’s providing a free service.
  - adrr 3y ago
    Multi region at least doubles your infra costs. Multi cloud will probably at least triple your costs since things like terraform don’t transfer cleanly and you can’t use even hosted services like RDS/CloudSQL, EKS/GKE because you won’t be able to replicate it across cloud providers due to all vendor specific differences.
    - dredmorbius 3y ago
      Note that the case here was of free-tier usage. Multi-provider setup may incur additional effort, though the payoff is in liberating yourself from lock-in to any one vendor. Note that those costs are being incurred here regardless, with both the costs of having to develop those on the fly and with downtime. Effectively, multi-provider set-up was a deferred cost for yewtu.be, now being realised. One trick for using hosted services to to avoid the service-specific tooling of the hosts in question. Yes, that decreases the value-add of such services, but again, the trade-off is reduced lock-in. There are also multi-platform solutions which stand as middleware between your own application and/or services and that of the host platform.
2h 3y ago
I tried signing up for Oracle Cloud and got the below message. After that I took the exact same card and signed up with 4 other providers. Fuck you Oracle. > Error processing transaction > We're unable to complete your sign up. Common sign up errors are due to: (a) Using prepaid cards. Oracle only accepts credit card and debit cards (b) Intentionally or unintentionally masking one's location or identity
- kytazo 3y ago
  I'm almost certain its most likely a credential farming operation at this point
- neurostimulant 3y ago
  Is it a prepaid virtual card? Cloud providers these days tend to block such cards. With so many horror story about getting unexpected huge bills, it would be sensible to use prepaid virtual card, but I guess cloud providers would never risk potential non-payment for allowing prepaid virtual card.
  - 2h 3y ago
    nope. normal, run of the mill Bank of America Visa debit.
sproketboy 3y ago
[dead]
morkalork 3y ago
So what does the internet on a desktop look like in the next 3, 5 and 10 years? Every site requires an account and logging in, if not an app install? Instead of phones becoming like computers, computers are becoming like phones.
- extasia 3y ago
  Computers becoming like phones has to be avoided at all costs.. That's not a world I wanna live in.
daneel_w 3y ago
I don't want to come off as an apologist for Oracle or the OCI product, but I can't help to wonder if there's more to the story than just "this provider will randomly ban accounts without any reason". The only real "without any reason" I'm aware of is free tier infra running on an account that hasn't upgraded to paid tenancy. "Always-Free" resources belonging to an unpaid tenancy can be deallocated without notice in order to provide resources for a paid tenancy.
- jeroenhd 3y ago
  Nitter frontends and Mastodon bridges have repeatedly been struck with DMCA takedowns and cease and desist letters because someone Googled themselves and found a strange website replicate their account. There are malicious people out there (on large, official platforms as well, because moderation is fiction) that will replicate someone's social feed and then adds controversial crap/crypto scams/weird stuff in the middle of it all. Taking action against imposters is sometimes necessary. If you're a normal Youtube channel and you find someone "ripping" your videos to Yewtube, I completely understand why someone would demand a takedown. Most people barely know how to operate a browser, let alone understand the concept of privacy preserving alternative frontends that work through local implementations of Youtube's client code. If you're some underpaid tech support person who gets a DMCA complaint about such a mirror, I wouldn't be surprised if they decide "take down first, ask questions later" would be a safe bet.
- gundmc 3y ago
  Agreed. I'm no Oracle apologist and I'm sure the author was understandably emotional when drafting this, but opening with "It is known that this provider will randomly ban accounts without any reason" - especially without linking to any references - just undermines the author's credibility and makes them seem immature.
- immibis 3y ago
  They don't randomly ban accounts for no reason, but they do ban accounts for slight reasons.
  - 3y ago
phendrenad2 3y ago
It's nice that alt tech is trying out all of these bottom-tier cloud providers and posting results. Now I know which ones to add to my "avoid at all costs" list (which is already quite long).
- RajT88 3y ago
  I had a customer who ran half their stuff on Azure and half on OCI. OCI was never a contender for expanding their footprint and they wanted to get off ASAP. You may think Azure is amateur hour, but it apparently does not hold a candle to OCI.
- fencepost 3y ago
  You really shouldn't need anything like this to make it obvious that getting into a customer relationship with Oracle is frequently a Very Bad Idea.
arun-mani-j 3y ago
If you like Invidious, NewPipe but want something for desktop or browser in general - check out Piped - https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped So basically it is a way to use YouTube with a proxy server in between. Quoting directly from LibreTube (an Android app based on Piped) - > With NewPipe, the extraction is done locally on your phone, and all the requests sent towards YouTube/Google are done directly from the network you're connected to, which doesn't use a middleman server in between. Therefore, Google can still access information such as the user's IP address. Aside from that, subscriptions can only be stored locally. > LibreTube takes this one step further and proxies all requests via Piped (which uses the NewPipeExtractor). This prevents Google servers from accessing your IP address or any other personal data. > Apart from that, Piped allows syncing your subscriptions between LibreTube and Piped, which can be used on desktop too. You can also self host it or use an instance like https://piped.video/ https://piped.video/
Remmy 3y ago
I recently moved to TubeSync and Jellyfin for YouTube videos. TubeSync will make a copy of the channel locally while applying Sponsorblock filters directly to the video file. It checks nightly for any new videos on the channel and Jellyfin sends me a notification when a new video is ready to watch.
jimjimjim 3y ago
I happily pay for youtube premium. I find that the content available is much more enjoyable than netflix and the others. If I have a couple of hours to kill it's probably going to be spent watching youtube series rather than browsing netflix. And I like supporting the content creators that I watch. Rather than just freeloading.
- shthed 3y ago
  shout out to https://nebula.tv/ https://nebula.tv/ theres a few good youtube creators who post their videos there a week early
haolez 3y ago
On a side note, I'm a CTO and I'm being seduced by Oracle's sales people due to their extremely low prices in my region. I'm on Azure and it's getting expensive. Can someone with actual experience using Oracle as a cloud provider chime in?
- forkfork 3y ago
  No specific experience with Oracle Cloud, but contract bullying on other products has led me to blacklist Oracle personally.
- xtracto 3y ago
  I tried oracle cloud for a similar reason and it was quite bad in several fronts: -their cloud console interface in general was bad - the technology is pretty rudimentary: after spinning up some ec2 instances and attaching some volumes, I needed to enter some strange custom commands in the terminal to make them useful (aside of the standard partitioning and mounting) - their cost explaining docs were worse than Amazon IMO. - for some reason they started spamming me with Portuguese mail (maybe because my last name looks like Portuguese?) - Somehow I cancelled my admin account but not some inner account so for some time i couldn't login but still had some volumes that were being charged... I couldn't delete them. - I tried to spin up one of their ready made wordpress instances but it wasn't working. I've since forgotten what was the issue but at the time I found it hilarious. Overall I wouldn't touch it for stuff related to work. Had very bad experience with them .
- immibis 3y ago
  Do you really need a cloud, or can you migrate to one or more dedicated servers which - unless your project is small enough to fit on one of those $5 servers that only exists in clouds - are probably much cheaper than you think?
  - haolez 3y ago
    An S3 equivalent is very convenient.
    - 3y ago
pyaamb 3y ago
Question: If I come up with a clever tweet and then post it, does twitter own that data? what if i posted it to a middleware like a browser extension that then posts to twitter but also makes it accessible on an ipfs feed?
- pyaamb 3y ago
  Do I have the right as a twitter user to host my tweets outside of twitter? Does where I posted first matter?
  - boomboomsubban 3y ago
    IANAL. You still own the content you create, including your tweets, but by tweeting that content Twitter can do basically whatever they want with that data too. If I wanted to publish a website of your tweets, I believe I could contact you and get your permission, or I negotiate the rights through Twitter, like using their third party API.
oogabooga13 3y ago
Of all the streaming options out there (Netflix, MAX, insert-your-service here) I pay for Youtube Premium. Has paid for itself many times over, especially with YT Music which is really good -it pulls from YT so I can get those rare songs/mixes that some individual just decided to upload from their personal collection. Also can download pretty much any video for offline vewiewing in the app. The "free" movie selection is also really good (no ad's in premium). It's curated (read not endless fluff) and I spend less time thumbing through the damn menus (looking at you Netflix) and just watching stuff. As an example YT Movies>Free just released James Cameron's Doc: Deepsea Challenge right after the Titan implosion. This type of realtime, zeitgeist curation happens all the time in their "free movie section" If you are starting from 0 in the submersible space great way to break the ice and start to grasp what that type of exploration entails. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZD_nbS1_II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZD_nbS1_II Been with them since the Google Play Music days, just a happy customer.
eur0pa 3y ago
Every time something about invidious and piped instances is brought up, YT Premium shills come out of the woodwork like GTP4-powered bots
- tmpz22 3y ago
  But YouTube shorts are way better than traditional long form video. An alternative interface that doesn’t put YouTube shorts front and center is bad design.
- immibis 3y ago
  it's because do you remember several years back when the popular meme was "I wish I could just pay some money every month to avoid ads" and then youtube actually did it?

226 points by nouryqt 3y ago

It's interesting that they had two different accounts specifically in case one got borked, and then Oracle simultaneously closed both without warning. As far as I can tell, the site is just a youtube frontend, so it's unclear if this was some sort of pseudo-DMCA thing, or if Oracle Cloud just sometimes intentionally scorched-earths paying customers.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
supriyo-biswas 3y ago
Projects like this usually run off of Oracle cloud to take advantage of the free tier. Reclamation of resources on the free tier is not unheard of, especially if abuse or high resource usage is detected, and other cloud providers like AWS will do it too.
- re-thc 3y ago
  It's sort of the opposite. If you're on a free account with free tier and under utilize resources below a certain threshold it may get reclaimed after a while.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    It's both. Create a server but never login it will be reclaimed. Try to use that 10T up and the account will be banned.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
CydeWeys 3y ago
It was probably easy for Oracle to identify that both accounts were being used to serve this site of questionable legality. And having multiple accounts is probably against Oracle's ToS anyway.
- RajT88 3y ago
  AFAIK there is nothing illegal about YouTube frontend sites. While they may in some way violate Google TOS, that is not a legal matter.
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    In the United States violating the TOS of a web site is technically a criminal offense under the CFAA, although the government is choosing currently not to prosecute most of these offenses[0]; but beware as that is simply a policy that can be ignored at any time it is useful. [0] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-announces-new-policy-charging-cases-under-computer-fraud-and-abuse-act https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-announces-...
bsder 3y ago
It was almost certainly over-utilization of a low revenue tier that did it. Cloud companies all make certain claims around bandwidth/CPU/memory/etc. on low tiers, but if you actually fully utilize the tier, they'll almost invariably make your life miserable. Normally they won't outright boot you (this seems surprising), but your instances will suddenly always be limited to what the Cloud Company considers to be "proper" for the low tier you are paying for--which magically is always much smaller than what they advertise.

Tomte 3y ago

[flagged]

chmod775 3y ago
There's a real https://jewtube.com/ https://jewtube.com/ and it's definitely not racist.
- boondoggle16 3y ago
  There's also goyimtv but that one is definitely racist.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
anamexis 3y ago
It rhymes with youtube in English orthography, that's literally it

isoprophlex 3y ago

Whoa, "Oracle Cloud", i have no experience with their services, but judging from their enterprise products that sounds like the grossest possible thing to run a personal project on...

nisa 3y ago
It's very likely that they just used two free-tier instances for this and Oracle discovered that and it's against their ToS (creating multiple free-tier instances).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
creatonez 3y ago
The reason they are gaining traction among hobbyists is their enormously generous free tier, where you get a 4x vCPU / 24 GiB ARM Ampere VPS and get to keep it as long as there is traffic and CPU usage.
- perceptronas 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing. It does sound almost too good to be true. I'll check it out
  - isp 3y ago
    Setup details from a user of the Oracle Cloud "Always Free" tier: https://ryanharrison.co.uk/2023/01/28/oracle-cloud-free-server.html https://ryanharrison.co.uk/2023/01/28/oracle-cloud-free-serv... Disclaimer: I haven't tried this out myself. I found this blog post a few days ago when I first heard about the generous Oracle Cloud free tier.
    - martinsnow 3y ago
      Wow. Wonder how long it will last?

srmarm 3y ago

I'm not really sure what the site does, looks like a cleanly designed proxy for youtube? If it's a service that's piggybacking on another site there's a good chance it'll get shut down at some point. I get the feeling the author of the post is a little naïve that this comes as a surprise, that their two accounts with Oracle were linked and banned in unison came as a surprise and there wasn't a backup. However anyone who uses a site like this knows it's easy come/easy go. You get what you pay for and appreciate the time, effort and money the webmaster has put in and make your own arrangements to save anything of importance to your local machine.

MallocVoidstar 3y ago
It's an invidious instance: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious https://github.com/iv-org/invidious (actually https://github.com/yewtudotbe/invidious-custom https://github.com/yewtudotbe/invidious-custom since it has some custom patches)
supriyo-biswas 3y ago
These are Invidious instances[1], which proxy Youtube content for privacy reasons, though the project is having some legal troubles right now[2]. [1] https://invidious.io https://invidious.io [2] https://blog.thefrenchghosty.me/posts/im-not-invidious/ https://blog.thefrenchghosty.me/posts/im-not-invidious/
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
  That second link, the blog post, is very weird. I understand the Spartacus-cum-Anonymous message that they're going for but the language is all over the place. Invidious can receive emails but isn't a person or business entity? I might just as well say that Knobble@McKnees.com isn't a person contactable via the Internet, it _just is_.
  - supriyo-biswas 3y ago
    I agree it's a weird way to defend a C&D; it was discussed on HN previously[1] with many commenters pointing out the same. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36262722 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36262722

nisa 3y ago

What is the appeal from these YouTube frontends? I came to really dislike them because links are broken after a while because these sites don't live very long and the video data itself is still streamed by YouTube? I don't get it.

MallocVoidstar 3y ago
I run a Piped instance on a VPS for myself. It's not linked to my Google account or my home IP (from Alphabet's perspective) in any way. I like giving Alphabet less info about my behavior.
- pantulis 3y ago
  But then... aren't you missing recommendations and suggested videos? Honest question, I'd say Youtube is half as useful without that.
  - TheBozzCL 3y ago
    It does provide basic recommendations based on the video you’re currently watching. If you only care about the channels you’re subscribed to, it’s a much better experience.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    YouTube will make recommendations based on your immediate session's viewing history, even without an account. A tremendous advantage to viewing without authenticating is that you can quickly set a strong affinity based on your current interests, and don't have to live with consequences of viewing low-quality content for hours, days, months, years, millennia, etc. If Invidious and Piped offer(ed) the option to permabam channels as well (to those subscribing directly to those services, or even within a single session), so much the better.
  - toast0 3y ago
    Youtube without recommendations and suggested videos is a whole lot easier to get in and get out, without getting hooked into watching one more thing.

pierat 3y ago

[flagged]

dredmorbius 3y ago

For those not familiar with it, yewtu.be is an Invididous instance, where Invidious is an alternate front-end to YouTube, similar in spirit to Nitter (Twitter), Teddit (Reddit), the late Bibliogram (InstagramProxiTok, and more. Another YouTube front-end is Piped. It's possible to use public instances of many of these, or to self-host your own. There are browser extensions such as LibRedirect which will automatically, well, redirect requests to these alternatives, with extensive configurability by the user. <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/> YewTu.be went offline last week amidst news that Google were cracking down on YouTube viewers employing adblocking. As to benefits of Invidious and Piped front-ends: - No subscription required. - Less data exposure to YouTube /Google itself. - Lighter website / improved UI/UX. - One small way of registering dissatisfaction to YouTube for dark patterns / user-hostile site practices. Invidious: <https://invidious.io/ https://invidious.io/> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invidious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invidious> Piped: <https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped>

gymbeaux 3y ago
It’s cute that Google thinks we’re all going to pay for YouTube Premium/TV instead of just not watching YouTube. That’s where I’m at. I don’t watch anything on YouTube anymore, and like when Reddit got “smart” and drove me away, I’ve noticed my mental health improve.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bosch_mind 3y ago
  Same here! The UX is so bad on both I just can’t use either. Not hard to quit when usability sucks and I find other things to do… like read or go outside.
- lacrimacida 3y ago
  In the same boat here. But they couldn’t care less, the masses is what they’re after. I came to and been using invidio.us to listen to lectures without any video, a feture that works on Iphones with the screen turned off. Not sure whether apple or google are the ones who don’t allow for that.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

xyst 3y ago

> It is known that this provider will randomly ban accounts without any reason. and yet this site was still using them prior to ban hammer because “it probably won’t happen to me” I will always say this: fuck Oracle. Fuck Larry Ellison. Any person or company that uses their products despite knowing the shit the founder and company has done deserves any consequences

dredmorbius 3y ago
Another lesson is that "multi-cloud" should mean "multi cloud-provider", if you're going to go that way. And that self-hosting as a fallback (if only to test backup and recovery procedures) is also highly underappreciated.
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  I do love the ideal of multi-cloud in theory but the practicalities aren’t so simple. It’s hard enough for businesses to pull it off, let alone someone who’s providing a free service.
- adrr 3y ago
  Multi region at least doubles your infra costs. Multi cloud will probably at least triple your costs since things like terraform don’t transfer cleanly and you can’t use even hosted services like RDS/CloudSQL, EKS/GKE because you won’t be able to replicate it across cloud providers due to all vendor specific differences.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    Note that the case here was of free-tier usage. Multi-provider setup may incur additional effort, though the payoff is in liberating yourself from lock-in to any one vendor. Note that those costs are being incurred here regardless, with both the costs of having to develop those on the fly and with downtime. Effectively, multi-provider set-up was a deferred cost for yewtu.be, now being realised. One trick for using hosted services to to avoid the service-specific tooling of the hosts in question. Yes, that decreases the value-add of such services, but again, the trade-off is reduced lock-in. There are also multi-platform solutions which stand as middleware between your own application and/or services and that of the host platform.

2h 3y ago

I tried signing up for Oracle Cloud and got the below message. After that I took the exact same card and signed up with 4 other providers. Fuck you Oracle. > Error processing transaction > We're unable to complete your sign up. Common sign up errors are due to: (a) Using prepaid cards. Oracle only accepts credit card and debit cards (b) Intentionally or unintentionally masking one's location or identity

kytazo 3y ago
I'm almost certain its most likely a credential farming operation at this point
neurostimulant 3y ago
Is it a prepaid virtual card? Cloud providers these days tend to block such cards. With so many horror story about getting unexpected huge bills, it would be sensible to use prepaid virtual card, but I guess cloud providers would never risk potential non-payment for allowing prepaid virtual card.
- 2h 3y ago
  nope. normal, run of the mill Bank of America Visa debit.

sproketboy 3y ago

[dead]

morkalork 3y ago

So what does the internet on a desktop look like in the next 3, 5 and 10 years? Every site requires an account and logging in, if not an app install? Instead of phones becoming like computers, computers are becoming like phones.

extasia 3y ago
Computers becoming like phones has to be avoided at all costs.. That's not a world I wanna live in.

daneel_w 3y ago

I don't want to come off as an apologist for Oracle or the OCI product, but I can't help to wonder if there's more to the story than just "this provider will randomly ban accounts without any reason". The only real "without any reason" I'm aware of is free tier infra running on an account that hasn't upgraded to paid tenancy. "Always-Free" resources belonging to an unpaid tenancy can be deallocated without notice in order to provide resources for a paid tenancy.

jeroenhd 3y ago
Nitter frontends and Mastodon bridges have repeatedly been struck with DMCA takedowns and cease and desist letters because someone Googled themselves and found a strange website replicate their account. There are malicious people out there (on large, official platforms as well, because moderation is fiction) that will replicate someone's social feed and then adds controversial crap/crypto scams/weird stuff in the middle of it all. Taking action against imposters is sometimes necessary. If you're a normal Youtube channel and you find someone "ripping" your videos to Yewtube, I completely understand why someone would demand a takedown. Most people barely know how to operate a browser, let alone understand the concept of privacy preserving alternative frontends that work through local implementations of Youtube's client code. If you're some underpaid tech support person who gets a DMCA complaint about such a mirror, I wouldn't be surprised if they decide "take down first, ask questions later" would be a safe bet.
gundmc 3y ago
Agreed. I'm no Oracle apologist and I'm sure the author was understandably emotional when drafting this, but opening with "It is known that this provider will randomly ban accounts without any reason" - especially without linking to any references - just undermines the author's credibility and makes them seem immature.
immibis 3y ago
They don't randomly ban accounts for no reason, but they do ban accounts for slight reasons.
- 3y ago

phendrenad2 3y ago

It's nice that alt tech is trying out all of these bottom-tier cloud providers and posting results. Now I know which ones to add to my "avoid at all costs" list (which is already quite long).

RajT88 3y ago
I had a customer who ran half their stuff on Azure and half on OCI. OCI was never a contender for expanding their footprint and they wanted to get off ASAP. You may think Azure is amateur hour, but it apparently does not hold a candle to OCI.
fencepost 3y ago
You really shouldn't need anything like this to make it obvious that getting into a customer relationship with Oracle is frequently a Very Bad Idea.

arun-mani-j 3y ago

If you like Invidious, NewPipe but want something for desktop or browser in general - check out Piped - https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped So basically it is a way to use YouTube with a proxy server in between. Quoting directly from LibreTube (an Android app based on Piped) - > With NewPipe, the extraction is done locally on your phone, and all the requests sent towards YouTube/Google are done directly from the network you're connected to, which doesn't use a middleman server in between. Therefore, Google can still access information such as the user's IP address. Aside from that, subscriptions can only be stored locally. > LibreTube takes this one step further and proxies all requests via Piped (which uses the NewPipeExtractor). This prevents Google servers from accessing your IP address or any other personal data. > Apart from that, Piped allows syncing your subscriptions between LibreTube and Piped, which can be used on desktop too. You can also self host it or use an instance like https://piped.video/ https://piped.video/

Remmy 3y ago

I recently moved to TubeSync and Jellyfin for YouTube videos. TubeSync will make a copy of the channel locally while applying Sponsorblock filters directly to the video file. It checks nightly for any new videos on the channel and Jellyfin sends me a notification when a new video is ready to watch.

jimjimjim 3y ago

I happily pay for youtube premium. I find that the content available is much more enjoyable than netflix and the others. If I have a couple of hours to kill it's probably going to be spent watching youtube series rather than browsing netflix. And I like supporting the content creators that I watch. Rather than just freeloading.

shthed 3y ago
shout out to https://nebula.tv/ https://nebula.tv/ theres a few good youtube creators who post their videos there a week early

haolez 3y ago

On a side note, I'm a CTO and I'm being seduced by Oracle's sales people due to their extremely low prices in my region. I'm on Azure and it's getting expensive. Can someone with actual experience using Oracle as a cloud provider chime in?

forkfork 3y ago
No specific experience with Oracle Cloud, but contract bullying on other products has led me to blacklist Oracle personally.
xtracto 3y ago
I tried oracle cloud for a similar reason and it was quite bad in several fronts: -their cloud console interface in general was bad - the technology is pretty rudimentary: after spinning up some ec2 instances and attaching some volumes, I needed to enter some strange custom commands in the terminal to make them useful (aside of the standard partitioning and mounting) - their cost explaining docs were worse than Amazon IMO. - for some reason they started spamming me with Portuguese mail (maybe because my last name looks like Portuguese?) - Somehow I cancelled my admin account but not some inner account so for some time i couldn't login but still had some volumes that were being charged... I couldn't delete them. - I tried to spin up one of their ready made wordpress instances but it wasn't working. I've since forgotten what was the issue but at the time I found it hilarious. Overall I wouldn't touch it for stuff related to work. Had very bad experience with them .
immibis 3y ago
Do you really need a cloud, or can you migrate to one or more dedicated servers which - unless your project is small enough to fit on one of those $5 servers that only exists in clouds - are probably much cheaper than you think?
- haolez 3y ago
  An S3 equivalent is very convenient.
  - 3y ago

pyaamb 3y ago

Question: If I come up with a clever tweet and then post it, does twitter own that data? what if i posted it to a middleware like a browser extension that then posts to twitter but also makes it accessible on an ipfs feed?

pyaamb 3y ago
Do I have the right as a twitter user to host my tweets outside of twitter? Does where I posted first matter?
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  IANAL. You still own the content you create, including your tweets, but by tweeting that content Twitter can do basically whatever they want with that data too. If I wanted to publish a website of your tweets, I believe I could contact you and get your permission, or I negotiate the rights through Twitter, like using their third party API.

oogabooga13 3y ago

Of all the streaming options out there (Netflix, MAX, insert-your-service here) I pay for Youtube Premium. Has paid for itself many times over, especially with YT Music which is really good -it pulls from YT so I can get those rare songs/mixes that some individual just decided to upload from their personal collection. Also can download pretty much any video for offline vewiewing in the app. The "free" movie selection is also really good (no ad's in premium). It's curated (read not endless fluff) and I spend less time thumbing through the damn menus (looking at you Netflix) and just watching stuff. As an example YT Movies>Free just released James Cameron's Doc: Deepsea Challenge right after the Titan implosion. This type of realtime, zeitgeist curation happens all the time in their "free movie section" If you are starting from 0 in the submersible space great way to break the ice and start to grasp what that type of exploration entails. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZD_nbS1_II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZD_nbS1_II Been with them since the Google Play Music days, just a happy customer.

eur0pa 3y ago

Every time something about invidious and piped instances is brought up, YT Premium shills come out of the woodwork like GTP4-powered bots

tmpz22 3y ago
But YouTube shorts are way better than traditional long form video. An alternative interface that doesn’t put YouTube shorts front and center is bad design.
immibis 3y ago
it's because do you remember several years back when the popular meme was "I wish I could just pay some money every month to avoid ads" and then youtube actually did it?