rest-server VS Invidious

Similar here. Termux with restic, so it does deduplication and encryption and such (also compression since a few months but haven't turned it on yet).

On local laptop: run https://github.com/restic/rest-server/ to accept the incoming data, then (if 1234 is the port that rest-server runs on):

    user@laptop:~$ ssh -R 1234:localhost:1234 root@phone

I use restic to a cloud storage provider and restic-server to another nas. I used hyperbackup for a long time but proved to not be flexible enough and I wanted to get away from a proprietary backup that could only be restored on another Synology.

Have a look at restic and restic-rest-server.

Min.io is just one of the supported storage backends. If you prefer, the restic rest server seems to be supported and might be easier to host. https://github.com/restic/rest-server

restic with rest-server

This one is quite unclear:

> We have added checksums for various backends so data uploaded to a backend can be checked there.

What do you mean checksums? All data is already stored in files with as filename the sha256sum of the contents, so clearly it's all already checksummed and can be verified right?

Looking into the changelog entry[1], this is about verifying the integrity upon uploading:

> The verification works by informing the backend about the expected hash of the uploaded file. The backend then verifies the upload and thereby rules out any data corruption during upload. \n\n [...] besides integrity checking for uploads [this] also means that restic can now be used to store backups in S3 buckets which have Object Lock enabled.

Object lock is mentioned in passing (and only in this more detailed info) but this is a big one. S3 docs:

> Object Lock can help prevent objects from being deleted or overwritten for a fixed amount of time or indefinitely.

i.e. ransomware protection. Good luck wiping backups if your backup host refuses to overwrite or delete the files. And you know the files are good because they match their hash.

Extortion is still a thing, but if people would use this, it more-or-less wipes out the attack vector of ransomware. The only risk is if the attacker is in your systems long enough to outlast your retention period. Did anyone say "test your backups"?

For self-hosting, restic has a custom back-end called rest-server[2] for that which supports a so-called "append-only mode" (no overwriting or deleting). I worked on the docs for this[3] together with rawtaz and MichaelEischer to make this more secure, because eventually, of course, your disks are full or you want to stop paying for legacy data on S3, and an attacker could have added dummy backups to fool your automatic removal script into thinking it needs to leave only the dummy backups. Using the right retention options, this attack cannot happen.

Others are doing some pretty cool stuff in the backup sphere as well, e.g. bupstash[4] has public key encryption so you don't need to have the decryption keys as a backup client.

[1] https://github.com/restic/restic/releases/v0.13.0

[2] https://github.com/restic/rest-server/

[3] https://restic.readthedocs.io/en/latest/060_forget.html#secu...

[4] https://github.com/andrewchambers/bupstash/

The append-only mode can be implemented using https://github.com/restic/rest-server or services like rsync.net that offer read-only zfs snapshots. Doesn’t solve the asymmetric crypto of course.

But how is that better than running the REST server which is also an HTTP-based API? Or is it? I suspect the answer is going to be system dependent but I am curious.

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