YouTube has been much more aggressive about blocking my access to their videos - to the point that they’ve made it pretty inconvenient to use FreeTube (I have to refresh pages 2-3 times for the video to load or it gets blocked, and some videos just won’t play at all and I have to use MPC-HC instead) and of course they’ve still completely blocked my access to YouTube videos in the browser

so I’ve been backing up all of my favorite YouTube videos to my hard drive using yt-dlp. at this level of enshittification who knows if I’ll still have a workaround for watching YouTube videos in a year or so, or even if YouTube as a website will still exist

also if you’re unable to watch age-restricted youtube videos with mpc-hc here’s a fix!

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/12676#issuecomment-2747253332

now that I have a fuckton of videos on my hard drive, would it be worthwhile and ethical for me to upload them to a Fedi video-hosting instance? they’re not my videos and I don’t have permission to repost them but I just want to save them from being erased by the megacorps and I want more people to be able to access them

@kasdeya I think asking for permission first is probably more respectful towards the creators

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@nol that definitely makes sense! unfortunately some of the videos that I want to repost are from accounts that are now abandoned, so I won’t be able to ask permission from them

@kasdeya ah I see. In that case I’d personally think of it as archival work

@CIMB4 @nol ooh good idea! I hope there is one like that

I’ve been trial-and-erroring which specific extensions are causing #YouTube to block me (the hope being that I can disable some of them in order to watch videos without ads), and it turns out that it’s none of them? or at least, if I disable uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock, Privacy Badger, and Decentraleyes, I’m still not allowed to watch YouTube videos. the extra confusing thing is that YouTube’s block screen says that all I have to do is disable uBlock Origin and refresh the page and I should instantly be able to watch videos again

I wonder if, after long enough, they just permablock a certain YouTube session. because the interesting thing is that if I open a private window with uBlock Origin enabled, I can watch YouTube videos there just fine

so, I’m going to keep watching YouTube videos in that private window for a while, and if after 24-48 hours I still don’t see the block screen, then that lets me know that uBlock Origin is not what’s triggering the {disable your adblocker to watch this video} screen

@CIMB4 oof okay good to know - thank you. I wonder if I just got unlucky and triggered their “perma”ban during a period when uBlock was detectable. I feel like sooner or later I’m going to learn how to game this system, though

@kasdeya It would be ethical. Liberating publicly-published data from corposcum enclaves and ensuring its perenity & accessibility is virtuous.

The trick is that it comes down to the moral & ethical framework you subscribe to.

Whether it would be worthwhile is a harder question, because takedowns are a considerable risk (on the clearnet), discoverability in most current options needs a lot of work and hosting resources would constrain use potential of the data. So in short "it depends".