Frontends Hosting Shutdown Notice (updated Aug 22 for clarity.)

For anyone just wanting the notice, here’s a quick TL;DR. All privacy frontends, including the maintenance of the repository project GLOBE, will be discontinued on September 17th, 0:00 UTC. If you have saved any data on these, including on Invidious, it is highly recommended that you back it up before this date, as all server data will be permanently wiped. Some services, like SearXNG, save data on the browser side instead of on the server, but this is not easily accessible. As such, it is still recommended to back up any data you have. There is no ETA on when these will be hosted again, if at all, and which ones would be hosted.

At the latter half of 2022, I stumbled upon Invidious for the first time. The fact that you can watch YouTube, on a website that’s faster and actually private, without any extraneous nonsense, was amazing. And the fact that it was all actively supported by a community was great. I was sharing a server with a developer friend of mine, and figured it wouldn’t hurt to host as well. Plus, I could get extra recognition for any projects I make in the future. So I spent a few minutes setting it up, put it up on my site, and put it on the public listing. Pretty much immediately we got a ton of traffic. Lots of people were using my host over the next year or so, and it felt nice. I finally got my name out there, at least to a certain extent, and had a lot of positive messages from people using it. Thank you for anyone that did that and stuck around for this long, by the way.

Of course, all good things must come to an end. It’s been over a year since the dreaded YouTube block started, and I’m tired. I’ve been wanting to end this for a long time now, but it always seemed selfish. It certainly sounds like it, writing this now. I didn’t even develop this, I had supporters and people that use this, how could I stop? But it’s been an uphill battle for over a year now, and I simply can’t continue hosting without sacrificing even more. It doesn’t help that I feel like I wasted a lot of time and money, for something that a VPN or Tor can do leagues better.

I have 3 servers. In total, their costs are about $170/mo. (One is €90 and another is €41.23. I’m in the US and both have conversion fees.) Assuming the same cost, this year alone I have wasted $1,360. This is all to keep some websites up that, to be perfectly clear, only work half of the time and have a very small userbase relative to the cost. Not to mention that this entire time, someone can use a VPN and get the same benefits with very little downside… I have also barely received any donations - about $100 or so over the entire period I’ve been hosting.

Yes, I explicitly put a notice on the donations section that these will never be required. Yes, the donations section is small itself, and for a reason. But even if I got the $2040 a year in donations required to host, I would much prefer that it goes towards a better cause. Or at least one that is guaranteed to work.

With that being said, I will be donating $500 total by the end of the year for the following:

• The Invidious Team, partly for still trying to fight against Google’s garbage, partly for putting up with me. Shoutouts especially to unixfox.
• Fjixu, who also helped me out and still actively maintains his service.
• TheFrenchGhosty, same reasons.
• Riseup Collective, as they’re one of the only groups that actually provides real privacy for free.
• Trans Lifeline, hopefully I don’t need to explain this.

Whenever this is done, I’ll update this post with proof.

I want to thank everyone who’s used any of the services that I’ve hosted, and any developer that has worked on them. You’re all truly amazing. Hopefully in the next post I can talk about something more positive. Or hey, finally release a project that’s worth something.

Sayonara.

~ ggtyler

UPDATE: I wanted to clarify some things since some people missed the reasoning I was laying out here. To be fair, I should’ve elaborated more on some other details. There are multiple reasons why I’m no longer hosting:

• Money.
  • ~$170/mo, or over $2000/yr.
  • Not only is this expensive, but there are plenty of other, much better, things to be spending this on.
• Time.
  • Server maintenance take significant time to get perfect, especially for websites that use external services.
  • Not to mention, I’m in both work and college at the moment.
• Stability.
  • Invidious hasn’t been working reliably since June 2024.
  • Other similar YouTube frontends, such as Piped, have not been working at all or have barely worked since then.
  • SearXNG, RedLib, and more recently Breezewiki have started having similar problems.
• Public interest
  • As this is privacy-first, there are almost no analytics or hard numbers. However it’s clear that there are barely any users compared to other instances.
  • (Almost none, since Invidious logs the amount of active logged in users. There have been 26 this past month on NYC-1.)
• Alternatives
  • There are plenty of other instances that handle it better, such as Nadeko (Fjixu’s), PussTheCat (TheFrenchGhosty’s), NerdVPN, YewTube (unixfox’s invidious), Catgirl Cloud, The Bunny Zone, and many more.
  • If you need privacy, use a VPN or Tor. For something like YouTube, using a different session for each video should provide the same amount of privacy while being significantly more stable. (Session being restarting incognito mode, or for Tor using a new circuit / identity.)
  • If you don’t use it for privacy and instead for debloating, simply use uBlock Origin and Enhancer for YouTube. On mobile, you can use ReVanced.
  • If you’re using this for proxying (i.e. at school), here’s a list of some sites. (Yes, I’m linking FMHY on here. Even if you don’t like piracy for some reason, you can’t lie and say it isn’t a good resource for a lot of free stuff.)

Hopefully that clears some things up :)

Sayonara, again.

~ ggtyler