I can't put my disappointment into words at how many posts on here turn out to be YouTube videos. I click on maybe 5% of them to watch something. If only there was a label that the link goes to YouTube before clicking on the post title. Like flair.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2026
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๐คฃ why is this considered not safe for work. Work is not safe for you.
My plan for this: https://lemmy.ml/c/torrenttube
It essentially is just a script that involves creating torrents from youtube videos, using yt-dlp, and optionally posting them to that community. (People should also upload those torrents to other platforms).
I'm not good at popularizing things tho, and not sure what to do to get more people to use it.
they are very effective at paywalling their content
I feel like I'm missing something -- I don't really watch a whole lot of YouTube, or follow specific channels -- but I have virtually never had an issue using Invidious and/or yt-dlp, even with a VPN. When I occasionally hit a 403, rotating VPN servers is almost always enough to bypass it.
If that's "stealing" it's the first I'm hearing about it.
idk if this is what OP meant but I have started seeing "subscriber-only" videos which require being a paid subscriber to the channel to view, and I haven't found any working workarounds.
It'd be a very difficult endeavour, for the same reasons why there aren't that many popular alternatives: YouTube has so many videos. Even just mirroring the videos from the top-100 channels would be extremely expensive. Google has a mind-blowing amount of storage space.
Aaarrr, me matey! The seas are full of plunder, for those who look!
Because someone has to pay for the storage and bandwidth, which is hugely expensive. To fund it they'd have to charge subscriptions or run ads, same as Google.
Exactly. Everyone gets mad about being asked to pay, but servers and employees are not free. That money need to come from somewhere. And we all know the saying, "If you aren't paying for it, you're the product." A subscription is probably the most ethical way to fund a service like YouTube aside from a "pay what you want" system which runs the risk of not bringing in enough to to cover costs.
Even if you started doing this 5 years ago, there would be absolutely no way you could do this, there's a ridiculous amount of content being uploaded.
Not exactly sure what the end goal is. To get YouTube content but not pay? YouTube is free at the point of use. There are great adblockers like ublock Origin and SponsorBlock that can be used on mobile (android) devices and web browsers to rid yourself of ads.
There are resources available to download YouTube videos and save a 'local copy' like yt-dl. This is only practical for selected videos. For education purposes of course.
The main issue is that there is a huge volume of YouTube content though. Like 8 hours per second. That becomes prohibitively expensive and impractical.
Not that I am suggesting you use these tools :)
There are alternatives like peer tube that is decentralised, some leftist creaters are on meanstv.
EDIT: spelling and clarifying
My first thought is we need open source recommendations algorithms. Just something that can run locally. That's only because there's so much content.
Second thought is make an extension that basically intercepts your click so if you're on YouTube and a torrent exists then you watch the torrent with an option to start a torrent