Thanks for this. I had just been manually replacing the youtube.com part of the URL to my favourite Piped instance. The breadth of the addon is great.

To add on to this tip, for anyone who is reluctant to or cannot install an extension on their browser, you can copy and paste the YouTube link into the search bar of your favorite Piped instance and hit Enter.

Thnk you so very much for that recommendation!

Good suggestion, thanks!

You’re welcome! Now, anyone who creates a post/comment with a YouTube link will know about it too :)

You can now try sending it a message mentioning communities in the format !community@instance.tld and it will try joining it :)

Good to hear that :) Inviting the bot definitely helps it reach more communities, so thanks for that!

Piped can be more privacy friendly in a few cases, as you don’t need an account for subscriptions or playlists.

Here are some differences to Invidious:

• Subscriptions don’t necessarily require an account
• Playlists don’t necessarily require an account
• Piped supports Infinite scrolling
• Piped supports Webm videos
• Piped can stream videos from Odysee if the same video is available there.
• Piped is a lot lighter on the server
• Piped always proxies your traffic to Google’s servers (most Invidious servers don’t proxy videos to YouTube by default)
• Piped has SponsorBlock integrated (DeArrow will be added soon)
• Piped has ReturnYouTubeDislike support via RYD-Proxy
• Piped can only be self-hosted on a server. Invidious on the other hand can work fine on local networks.
• Piped is a lot easier to administer than Invidious as an instance operator.

I’ll conclude by saying that I was once an Invidious user. I decided to write Piped at a time when Invidious was riddled with extremely odd bugs and performance issues. Some of these issues still persist to this day. I’ve always kept performance a top priority in Piped. I wanted to create a better alternative to YouTube than Invidious for my use case and threat model. I think I have succeeded in that :)

Is Piped something that you have to self host

No, you don’t have to self-host it. You have a large number of public instances hosted generously by people! You may want to however self-host it however if you don’t live close to an instance, or want to actually own your own data.

Are there instances out there that this redirects to or a single server?

You can switch instances directly from the preferences page. You don’t need to change your URL for switching instances.

Is it a sort of P2P thing where different servers host different videos or parts of different videos?

No, Piped has no P2P aspects at all. What you describe is technically infeasible/difficult since we don’t store videos at all, just proxying them.

How will this be affected by Youtube cracking down on adblockers?

Time will tell, so far we aren’t affected. But, we could be affected when it fully rolls out rather than as an A/B test.