LibreServer Blog / YouTube Substitution

A while ago I added automatic substitution of YouTube links for equivalent invidious ones in Epicyon. It was just hardcoded, and I knew that such methods are always really a temporary mitigation in a cat and mouse game between Google and the video viewing public. Doing this means that Google doesn't get some of the "behavioral surplus" data which it otherwise would, and so increases privacy a little. But now invidious has announced that it's shutting down, and so the substitutions will be obsolete.

I could just remove this feature entirely, but there might be other similar sites which are usable. So instead I've made the substitution domain configurable. If you know of other sites doing something equivalent to invidious then you can enter the domain in your profile settings.

Things like this only exist because YouTube is so hegemonic. In the longer term maybe Peertube or similar systems will allow video hosting to become not as centralized.