it’s not fake, bing rewards has been a thing for many years. It’s literally just using bing to search things, each search gives you points, and then you redeem giftcards (amazon, uber, etc)
I guess most here don’t particularly care, but the points mechanic it’s nice
I wouldn’t say it’s borderline unusable tbh…
The first adware result is blocked with any ad blocker, the fact you see it means you might not have your ad blocker on, or disabled in incognito mode.
The second and third copilot bullshit sections can be toggled off from any search result page, on the sidebar settings there’s a toggle.
I do appreciate the bing rewards thing, basically every few weeks I get a gift card because you earn points by using bing
google has been blocking any IP that uses lots of youtube bandwidth, and that means any public instance needs to do IP rotation.
I also heard they began blocking all IPs belonging to some cloud providers.
I run my own invidious instance from my home servr. Only I use it, so it’ll never be blocked, but I don’t have the same anonymity as if using a public instance…
It’s mostly for the benefits of using youtube ad-free without a google account, while having local bookmarks, watch-later, and subscription feed. If that’s your main goal Invidious is really easy to set-up.
I think a few more details are needed to get you a clear alternative:
In my case after degoogling, I use mainly apple devices besides my windows pc. 2 of my TVs have AirPlay built in, so there’s no issue casting anything. If your TV is rather recent it’s likely to have it too.
The third TV is tricky, it’s an older 4k LG. I have a linux box connected to it and installed UxPlay in it. It only works with AirPlay “mirroring” so you kinda need an app that can treat the TV as a second monitor. Otherwise the mirroring won’t cover the entire TV screen. I’m still assuming apple devices here, but there’s OutPlayer and nPlayer in the appstore that can do this. It does support sound-only casting, so if it’s music you want it should be able to direct cast from your apps.
The second caveat for UxPlay is that it only works with DRM-free content (youtube, self hosted media). For DRM content I haven’t found a nice alternative for the old TV , so I use its built in apps (netflix, amazon prime). Kodi exists, but the plug-ins support for streaming sites isn’t good, often getting stuck to low-res content.
I’m guessing buying an apple tv/fire stick/roku is the only alternative for DRM content casting. I also explored the idea of “degoogling” my unused chromecast 3rd gen, but absolutely nothing exists for this and it just collects dust in a drawer.
Today most Invidious instances are experiencing very harsh ip address rate limiting, it is becoming very very hard to watch yt videos through
AFAIK this is not what’s happening this time. YouTube slowly rolled out a change over the past 3 days that requires some sort of app verification for the android yt app. This is affecting Invidious since it emulates the yt android client to fetch video streams. This affects invidious instances hosted privately as well.
The maintainers are aware of this, and are working on ways to solve it. Tools like yt-dlp/newpipe still work because they have working implementations to fetch data by emulating web/iOS/etc clients.
Didnt look at it like that tbh, and it makes sense now that I think about it.
Title is kinda misleading. The issue only affects public instances, and it has been an ongoing problem since many months ago. Basically the moment youtube detects lots of traffic from one IP it gets blocked, and need sign-in.
It seems this block just became harder to work around, and they started blocking all IPs from hosting providers, but I’m sure a solution will be found eventually.
If you have a spare laptop/PC/raspberry pi you can host your own invidious in your home. It won’t get blocked, it will be much faster, and you can use options that are usually disabled on public instances (the API and DASH quality).
Then you can add something like tailscale/twingate into the mix to access it outside your home. Self hosted wireguard can also work if your ISP gives you a static IP or you setup a DDNS service. I personally use twingate because I don’t like opening any port in my router.