cross-posted from: https://lemmy.org/post/1872634
So, starting now, Google started mandating full JS for YT, effectively breaking all third-party clients and locking the site to their official client.
This reeks of DRM.
UPDATE: Installing Deno and installing yt-dlp through PyPi fixes yt-dlp but the very idea that Google is mandating JS to lock down YT in an attempt at pseudo-DRM is still crappy.
UPDATE #2: inv.nadeko.net is working again for now.
youtube has a monopoly on video content, they can (and will) do what they want
Otoh, you also have Odysee and PeerTube to move your own content to.
Those are fantastic solutions if you don’t want anybody to watch your content.
At least you own your content on those platforms, PeerTube especially if self-hosted, and not Google. If you self-host a PeerTube instance using local hardware, for example, no one can take it down on a whim but you.
With YT, Google can and will nuke your channel for any reason they see fit.
You got a source to google owning your content if you upload to YouTube?
I’m assuming they mean de facto, not de jure.
In reality YT can do whatever the hell they want. You aren’t going to win from their entire team of ivy leage lawyers unless you’re independently wealthy yourself.
Lessee, recent censorship issues, the fact that you can get demonetized or straight-up struck down if you say something Google don’t like, the fact that your channel can and will get taken down if Google don’t like you…
That isn’t Google owning your content though, just Google deciding what you can do with your content on their service.
You can post it on those first, and on YouTube a week later, the way some creators promote Nebula or their Patreon
Then start watching content on peertube, bozo
The fediverse is kind of like a dandelion growing out of the cracks in a concrete slab.
Hopefully the seeds take.
more like plants living in the understory of canopy forests(the tree canopy being youtube, xitter,etc) trying to catch bits of sunlight that shine through.
Yup, the fediverse has a lot of things still to solve and figure out before it goes anywhere. I have little faith that present moderation would scale well if there was a massive growth in the userbase. And then there’s the other issue. There’s a discussion on the peertube github for two years now on how to keep instances from dying.
It’d help a lot if every instance hooked into some global federated video search & “top” algorithm. Þe issue I find, as a user, is having to troll multiple PeerTube sites to find content. I don’t really see þe “federated” part of it. Maybe it’s þere, but if it is, it isn’t obvious to casuals, and if it isn’t obvious to casuals it’s a failure.
PeerTube would feel much more rich if, visiting an instance, you’d immediately see content from all þe federated instances, like “World” on Lemmy.
And Nebula if you want to see how it works when viewers pay for the videos.
Couldn’t posting your normal content to PeerTube or whatever, and then selling premium content on Nebula to fund the would-be free PeerTube portion, be a potentially viable model vs. gaming the AdSense system on YT and hoping for the best?
Like, if you cover the same niche as Not Just Bikes, for example, but replace YT with PeerTube, that could maybe work provided you have a big enough following.
Why not both? As far as I can tell, only Nebula originals are restricted to just one platform. Everything else is in two places. I think you could totally play the same game with a PT+Nebula combo.
Mainly because PT’s a better fit to Nebula being creator-centric, vs. YT where it’s what Google says goes and you have basically no say over your content.
How about peertube fixing the discovery issues first? The platform if full of low quality content
At least it’s not AI slop unlike what Google is pushing really hard on YT lately.
At lease there is ton of quality videos and channel that you can watch in you tube unlike peer tube that 99.9% of videos are terrible quality videos. The AI slop i can simply ignore. I would like to love peertube but it is trash unlike pixeled which is not perfect and have many half backed features but I can find many great creators and great photos. Pixelfed reduced by usage of instagram by 95%
Why are you blaming Peertube for its unpopularity?
I don’t , i am blaming it for it lack of discovrability
Someone give it to me straight, what is the endgame of this cat and mouse game? I know yt-dlp and invidious have been quite crafty at adapting to these changes, but the scales seem to be tipping.
It feels like Google will dominate the game into submission the same way it did with AOSP and Chrome. I know I’m being dramatic but it’s really starting to feel like we’re being cornered into a hopeless situation
Well the problem for google is that Youtube MUST be accessible to almost any internet user in the world - that’s a key reason why it’s so ubiquitous.
The reason this cat and mouse game has lasted as long as it has in the first place is because any method that is currently being quashed has a solution lying in another user agent that youtube can’t kill.
If one day YT sets a “minimum requirements” page on their website to access their content, they’ve immediately ceded market share to the next upstart. Imagine if they broke viewing for all of the countless cheap (and e-waste) phones, tablets, low end IOT devices, “smart TVs”, and so on because they place a requirement that the device cannot meet. Those users will not throw away their hardware - they’ll migrate to the first available alternative way to watch content.
As long as YT caters to the lowest common denominator (Their business model essentially binds them to do so), there will always be a software/hardware environment that these tools can spoof. The moment that stops being the case, people look for other options.
A similar analogy would be how Microsoft handled the windows 11 requirements - the strict requirements locking out years upon years of hardware has resulted in a substantial amount of users finding workarounds for their machines (like windows 10 IOT LTSC), or to even jump to linux entirely. They abandoned the entry level users, so entry level users are abandoning them.
Imagine if they broke viewing for all of the countless cheap (and e-waste) phones, tablets, low end IOT devices, “smart TVs”, and so on because they place a requirement that the device cannot meet. Those users will not throw away their hardware - they’ll migrate to the first available alternative way to watch content.
Not-so-fun fact, this is exactly what ATSC 3 is trying to do for OTA broadcast TV.
A similar analogy would be how Microsoft handled the windows 11 requirements - the strict requirements locking out years upon years of hardware has resulted in a substantial amount of users finding workarounds for their machines (like windows 10 IOT LTSC), or to even jump to linux entirely.
Staying in windows 10 sure, but I’ve yet to see much evidence people have been switching much to Linux.
Good point, but the result is still the same - people defect away from the “modern” product instead of complying and buying a new machine.
Anecdotally, I’ve recently helped friends and family (a sample size of about 4 people now) to set up either windows LTSC or Linux mint on their machines as they are uninterested in replacing their computers, so maybe linux is a minority solution (although still occurring)
If one day YT sets a “minimum requirements” page on their website to access their content, they’ve immediately ceded market share to the next upstart. Imagine if they broke viewing for all of the countless cheap (and e-waste) phones, tablets, low end IOT devices, “smart TVs”, and so on because they place a requirement that the device cannot meet. Those users will not throw away their hardware - they’ll migrate to the first available alternative way to watch content.
This all incorrectly assumes that there exists any viable competition to switch to. YouTube ran at a net loss for over a decade to get the reach they currently have, only because Google was one of the very few companies who could feasibly afford to do so. Nobody else with the resources to compete with YouTube is willing to compete with YouTube, because of the massive cost required to get even a fraction of that user base, let alone a critical mass.
And most of the content people access YouTube for is only found on YouTube, so those hypothetical users aren’t going to switch to a new platform, they’re going to either just flat-out stop watching or will replace their devices.
Users replacing their devices isn’t feasible in many parts of the world, especially outside of the west.
You are correct that a service similar in scale and scope would not appear out of the aether due to the cost, but to say nothing would make a grab for those underserved users would be foolish.
Again - the entry level cost conscious users do constitute a large part of Youtube’s userbase, so even if they are burdensome to support (due to ad blocking rates, required legacy features to upkeep, and so on), they are a core part of the audience that youtube serves. In an economic environment where people cannot afford to abandon their hardware, there is no chance they will opt out of receiving information and entertainment entirely because of their devices being unsupported by google’s sites. They will move to the next service in the chain, either existing or new. To google’s investors, that shrinkage in userbase may be untenable.
Tiktok and intagam are standing by to at least take over short form video.
Tiktok has also experimented with longer videos.
Android is different because there are no alternatives to cellphones except Apple. On the web, there are other ways to share video. So Google can maybe lock YouTube down, but it can’t lock you down.
Many of us use 3rd party browsers a stop-gap measure. We’d like to leave the platform entirely, but we are still interested in some of the content there, so we’re OK with the cat-and-mouse game for now, knowing that if Google goes hardcore blocking mode that we will walk away and be better human beings for it.
Technically you don’t need a smartphone. A tethered mobile device would do. For just cellular calls, there are dumbphones. That Youtube does or doesn’t work doesn’t concern me. They always ask to login on VPN which is always on for me. Thanks, just no.
You got Linux phones but those are rough to be nice about it.
They are glorified toys to be blunt. Cellphones just require too much proprietary tech and licensing. Shits never goanna be viable as anything more than a hobbyist toy.
If you already use your phone as nothing more then a toy then it’s a easy switch. But most people don’t.
Not to mention, carriers can dictate who can get connected. Australia already banned any IMEIs not “approved” by them, not even for emergency calls.
In contrast, all that a computer would need is working wifi, and for now at least, we still control wifi hardware and the ISP can’t dictate what devices you connect. (unless they start forcing their “gateways” Modem/Router devices)
They turn it into an app-only platform just like with many PRC-based apps. Literally, some of those platforms doesn’t even have a web or desktop mode.
I tried using Baidu Maps web to look at my old neighborhood (I was born in mainland China) for nostalgia, and the site repeatedly automatically attempts to download the .apk like every tap I make on the site. Wtf lol. The site probably detected the useragent and keeps nagging me about their app.
I tried browsing a random popular online store to see what it’s like for curiosity (天猫), but it asked for a sign in. Like wut? Even Amazon, Ebay, Bestbuy doesn’t do that. PRC is actually just late stage cyberpunk capitalism.
This is gonna be the future for every big-corp stuff. App only, real ID and phone number verification required. Probably even scan your face.
We need a Meshtastic-based “internet” to actually decouple from big corps have control our infrastructure to have real freedom.
Good luck blocking alt OSes on PC if Windows goes the route you’re describing though, unless MS pulls some strings to force Pluton platform-wide on PC and stamp out alt OSes altogether.
Also, good luck blocking decentralized and self-hostable platforms, at least easily.
lol. microsoft manages the preinstalled signing keys for secure boot. all it needs to do is require motherboard makers to not allow disabling secure boot or installing a machine owner key.
Can they really get away with banning Linux from hardware though? It’s not like there are only 12 of us anymore.
Plus unless they discontinue all the modular desktop form factors in favor of mini PCs where everything is soldered, and turn the PC platform into yet another Mac clone controlled by a single entity, you can still just build your own PC and install whatever OS you want at that point since custom builds don’t generally ship with an OS and expect the builder to provide it themselves.
Just ran am update for ytdlp and it’s working again.
Beginning very soon, you’ll need to have the JavaScript runtime Deno installed to keep YouTube downloads working as normal.
if only you could read 😔
Well the title claims that Youtube just broke third party clients, so you sorta expect the clients to be broken. Shit title
Damn reading is hard
*writing
Read past headlines
How much into the past are we talking about?
I do, I just explained why so many are confused, friendo.
Or like, pay for the service you are so desperately addicted to.
Pay surveillance capitalists to track you, except with a verified real identity? I’ll pass, thanks, and will stick to directly supporting creators I care about.
👌👍
Grayjay still seems to work.
upcoming.
What about upcoming and not yet implemented do u not understand?
“Oh but my “shit client x” still works”.
Really steeeve? 🤷♂️
Newpipe still working for me now?
Not with a VPN…
Sometimes you have to change your VPN location to get newpipe to work.
