"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.<p>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: <a href="https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-leadership/" rel="nofollow">https://blog.alexellis.io/the-5-pressures-of-leadership/</a>
Note that <a href="https://invidio.us" rel="nofollow">https://invidio.us</a> is not the only instance, just the most popular one. You can host your own, or use one of the others:<p><a href="https://instances.invidio.us" rel="nofollow">https://instances.invidio.us</a>
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.<p>It's a viable alternative to Spotify IMO as one use.<p>It's basically free Youtube Red. Really sad to hear this, hope the creator is better off for it though.
Here is the github issue thread: <a href="https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/1320" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/issues/1320</a><p>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.
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:<p><a href="https://github.com/iv-org/invidious" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/iv-org/invidious</a><p>> Invidious is an alternative front-end to YouTube
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.
What struck me is this:<p>> 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".<p>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.
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.
Oh that's a shame.<p>> The API will continue to function until October 1st, to give time for any services relying on it to migrate to other solutions.<p>Aw no. I was thinking about using invidio.us in my own projects but now I guess I won't!<p>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.<p>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.<p>So this is a great reminder to me to keep maintaining my own YouTube streaming server.<p>[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!!]