Django-link-archive VS Invidious

I am running my of YouTube front-end.

Link: https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

Demo: https://renegat0x0.ddns.net/apps/catalog

Allows me to add channels, download individual videos, bookmark videos, etc. Uses iframe to display the video.

I have no problems with viewing videos:

- I use ff with adblock

- videos are embedded using no-referrer-when-downgrade policy

I have literally no ads.

There are some drawbacks:

- YouTube may change their policies, change embedding strategies

- To have control over videos, you still have to manually download them

I wrote bookmark manager in Django.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

You can self host it.

You can add RSS sources and auto import new links regularly.

It may not be stare of the art, but gets the job done.

Demo below, but may not be working when you look at it. It runs on raspberry pi.

https://renegat0x0.ddns.net/apps/catalog/entry/11503/

I have myself dabbled a little bit in that subject. Some of my notes:

- some RSS feeds are protected by cloudflare. It is true however that it is not necessary for majority of blogs. If you would like to do more then selenium would be a way to solve "cloudflare" protected links

- sometimes even selenium headless is not enough and full blown browser in selenium is necessary to fool it's protection

- sometimes even that is not enough

- then I started to wonder, why some RSS feeds are so well protected by cloudflare, but who am I to judge?

- sometimes it is beneficial to cover user agent. I feel bad for setting my user agent to chrome, but again, why RSS feeds are so well protected?

- you cannot parse, read entire Internet, therefore you always need to think about compromises. For example I have narrowed area of my searches in one of my projects to domains only. Now I can find most of the common domains, and I sort them by their "importance"

- RSS links do change. There need to be automated means to disable some feeds automatically to prevent checking inactive domains

- I do not see any configurable timeout for reading a page, but I am not familiar with aiohttp. Some pages might waste your time

- I hate that some RSS feeds are not configured properly. Some sites do not provide a valid meta "link" with "application/rss+xml". Some RSS feeds have naive titles like "Home", or no title at all. Such a waste of opportunity

My RSS feed parser, link archiver, web crawler: https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive. Especially interesting could be file rsshistory/webtools.py. It is not advanced programming craft, but it got the job done.

Additionally, in other project I have collected around 2378 of personal sites. I collect domains in https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database/tree/ma... . These files are JSONs. All personal sites have tag "personal".

Most of the things are collected from:

https://nownownow.com/

https://searchmysite.net/

I wanted also to process domains from https://downloads.marginalia.nu/, but haven't got time to read structure of the files

"""

Disclaimer: I have a automated RSS reader enabled in my network: https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

On the other hand it is not 1995. Time has moved on. I wrote a Simple RSS feed, that also serves as search engine for bookmarks.

I am able to run it in attick on raspberry pi. We do not have to rely so heavily on google.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

It is true that it does not serve me as google, or kagi replacement. It is a very nice addition though.

With a little bit off determination I do not have to be so dependent on google.

Here is also a dump of known domains. Some are personal.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

...and my bookmarks

https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database

Some more years, and google can go to hell.

[4] https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

These are exported then to github repositories:

[5] https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database - bookmarks

[6] https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2023 - 2023 year news headlines

[7] https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - all known to me domains, and RSS feeds

My own repositories:

- bookmarked entries https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database

- mostly domains https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

- all 'news' from 2023 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2023

I am using my own Django program to capture and manage links https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive.

A list od blogs mentioned by hacker news, some were adres manually by me:

https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive/blob/main/an...

I have a project. I have posted it once herenon HN. I have not received any feedback then, it hasn't received much traction.

It is a link aggregation. Can be used as a RSS client, or YouTube front end for subscriptions.

It is intended for light, personal use, therefore it is not much scalable, but supports user management.

https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

Ha, I have also wrote something similar

https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

I support not only youtube, but also any RSS source.

It functions as link aggregation software. I can also fetch meta for all videos in channel, and download videos, audios.

I am using standard Django auth module.

It still lacks polish, and it is under development. I am not a webdev, so I am still struggling with overall architecture

Youtube seems to be doing some A/B testing with the comment system which has made proxies like Invidious and yt-dlp/Newpipe unable to load comments. There is a patch for Invidious [1] which solves this problem but it is not in master yet. I tested it on my own instance and it does solve the problem.

[1] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/pull/4576

BTW, I don't understand the workaround: https://github.com/iv-org/invidious/pull/4552/files

Which was taken from here: https://github.com/LuanRT/YouTube.js/pull/624

Could anybody explain it to me?

Use a Youtube proxy like Invidious [1], problem solved and you get to subscribe to channels without telling the Beast about your interests. Add Sponsorblock (which supports Invidious) to get rid of any in-stream advertising which remains and you'll be transported back to those hallowed times of yore when men were men, women were women and advertising was something you found in newspapers. Youtube will try to make this harder just like Xitter is trying to make it harder to use proxies like Nitter [2].

[1] https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

[2] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

Going to drop this here for others who haven't heard of it https://invidious.io/

Now, how do we fix this? YouTube's ad model sucks. Their algorithm sucks. Their front page sucks. They've captured a bunch of creators though so often YouTube is the only place you can find someone.

I want those creators to benefit from me viewing their videos. I want the fact that I view a video and like it to help other people find that video in their recommendations. I want an algorithm that shows me things that are interesting and relevant not one that promotes the spammiest and most ad heavy videos that barely have anything to do with my watch history.

Having an alternative front end is nice but I don't want to rob YouTube of the money they spend on hosting the videos.

So, how do we do this?

Peer to peer fails when there is little interest in something or when most people leech and it sucks for archiving old content.

Hosting it all in one place is super expensive and hard for a small group to manage without turning into YouTube.

Maybe we could find a way for the creators to host their own content and get paid when people view it while being part of a large federated network for easy discoverability?

Please list any projects you know of, I'm sure there are a lot of people here who would be willing to contribute or donate.

Sometimes a half-solution will do, like Invidious or Piped.

[0] https://invidious.io/

[1] https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped