Capitalism is the reason we can’t have nice things¹, and in the latest incarnation of it, Youtube’s war on privacy-protecting frontends means that mere months after it became possible, it became impossible again to easily watch Youtube videos on an Apple II.

Don’t get me wrong – it is still possible to rip videos out of Youtube and if you want to do it badly enough you will be able do it. As long as their business model involves showing actual videos to people in-between two ads, you will be able to get videos out of Youtube, and you will be able to remove the fucking ads from them too. It’s just going to be a bit more impractical, but there is a vast array of choice and they’re not going to be broken all at once, all the time: there is yt-dlp, newpipe, freetube, mpv, Invidious, and more. There are screengrabbers. You can still fucking film your screen while it plays a video and clean that up. Anyone motivated enough can do it and Youtube will never win that war.

But, because they can’t tolerate a few thousands privacy-minded people and anarchists watching a few videos without being tracked and fed fucking ads every 10 minutes, you can’t do it simply enough that it “Just works”™ from a hobby-grade Apple II client.

Thanks anarchists, dreamers and anti-capitalists

So I have pondered for weeks: what default instance URL to ship in IInvidious, so that people testing it can just type “bad apple” or “rickroll”, as one does, and just get what they want?

Should it be a big Invidious instance like invidious.fdn.fr or invidious.jing.rocks? These last two months showed that they’re down almost all the time since Google decided to fuck them over.

Should it be a little public instance ? I know of one that still works. But for how long?

Should I go through the hassle of setting up an Invidious instance on the Apple II proxy? It’s easy enough to start a working Invidious instance from a docker-capable computer. I have a very small shell script that does that automatically. But do I want to ship it on the Raspberry proxy image I provide ? Do I want to handle the docker-compose and systemd hassles that come with that? Do I want to take responsability if someday Youtube can recognize a private, home-hosted Invidious instance and proceed to IP-ban my users’ whole houses? Do I want to accept the work-load of maintaining it, as Youtube is going to keep trying to break it month after month? Certainly not.

So should it be a Peertube instance instead? That seems like the obvious choice: Peertube is cool. Peertube is free software, it’s built by cool weirdos like me, it does not exist to monetize their users and speedrun them to fascism like Youtube or Twitter² or Facebook. It exists so that people can share stuff peacefully without money and profitability being involved at every step.

So yes, obviously I should ship with a Peertube URL by default! I’m aligned with that view of the world. It’s the same reason I made a Mastodon client, and have no interest in making a Twitter client.

The only problem is that video’s expensive – in terms of storage and bandwidth. So most Peertube instances tend to be small and specialized. You won’t find everything you want to find on one single Peertube instance.

So this week-end, I’ve searched for a real solution, and I’ve found SepiaSearch.

It is a Peertube instances indexer, and allows searching across about a thousand instances, and it’s free software so you don’t have to fight it to get an answer from it, it has an API, it’s imperfect but you can open issues and pull requests, and it exactly is what I hoped! It’s also made by the fine people at Framasoft, and it feels really good to see this non-profit continue to thrive, with more than twenty years of existence, despite our collective apathy.

And I will leave you with this little monument of internet pop culture,

Footnotes:

1. It is also the reason fascism is back ↩︎
2. I’ll stop deadnaming Twitter when its owner will stop deadnaming his daughter. ↩︎

Debatable things:

Debatable things in this comments section include things like whether another default URL would be better and why; should IInvidious be renamed to make clear that its main working feature is to be a Peertube client, not an Invidious client; etc.

They do not include whether or not capitalism is one of the two root causes of everything that is wrong in the world, the other being patriarchy; neither whether those lead to fascism.