this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2023
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

I'll admit I hadn't seen that, and it sure does look like official API access. They also seem to make calls through that wrapper to access comments and plenty of other things, so it's not just sitting there unused.

Thankfully, TheFrenchGhosty is on the Fediverse, so let's ask him: @[email protected] @TheFrenchGhosty@[email protected] (not sure which one of these to use) How is this not using an official YouTube API?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

well, there was a long thread about this on /r/selfhosted where @[email protected] @[email protected] was saying pretty much what I said, but with a tad more mental gymnastics mostly about EU laws regarding reverse engineering and lack of a formal agreement between them and YouTube.

Unfortunately (or fortunately?), /r/selfhosted is private atm due to the blackout, so I'm unable to find and share thread link.

The facts are:

  • Invidious (as an OSS project) calls undocumented internal YouTube APIs (they call it InnerTube).
  • Anyone can host an Invidious instance.
  • The main Invidious instance, i.e: https://invidious.io/ received a cease and desist from YouTube.

@[email protected] @[email protected] posted all about this on GitHub, reddit, their personal blog, and contacted random media outlets like the one linked here, to complain about how "we have nothing to do with YouTube, why is YouTube bullying us". And since everyone obviously wants to give the little guy the benefit of the doubt, everyone starts wondering how it could be that a project that's all about providing an alternative UI for YouTube, doesn't call YouTube.

It's like if a movie pirating website is trying to argue

"Endgame.mp4" is just a file name. It has nothing to do with Marvel or Disney. What the hell are those greedy companies have to do with us??

I'm all for invidious, piracy, etc. But seriously?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Gday matey. The difference with Invidious and endgame.mp4, is that invidious doesnt host anything, its merely a proxy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A torrent tracker doesn't host anything either. It's merely a lighthouse for people to know who is hosting it. And trackers are hosted exclusively in certain specific countries because of that.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the issues with trackers is they were making money out of it? Iirc the trackers themselves, if kept from making a profit are untouchable

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'm not sure that's true. Most private trackers accept donations. Some even require you to buy some seedbox plan they get commission from (even though that's generally frowned upon).

All the high profile trackers I can think of that were shutdown through legal notice (Mininova, isoHunt, KickassTorrent, ThePirateBay, etc) were all public trackers. Maybe they had ads or something on their website, but their shutdown had nothing to do with them making money. They were shutdown for piracy even though they never "hosted" any content. They were just trackers.

Hell, even Popcorn Time, a software that just let you easily search torrents and stream them, it hosted nothing, just connected you to trackers that had movies was too shutdown by legal notice.

Trackers that survive are usually hosted behind VPNs and are physically located in Russia or China.

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