Five years and counting

It was yet another day at high school - I was packing up after a long and boring day of classes, heading over to the one part of school that I actually liked. It was a small club, consisting of myself, two of my friends from middle school (one who I still talk to,) and a teacher. Our ultimate goal was to make a robot to compete in the yearly competition. It…wasn’t going so well.

With only three members, previously four before one left, and only one person actually doing the work, our progress was insanely slow. We had just barely made a framework at the time and was very clearly not gonna make a working robot by the deadline. But today was a little different - we were gonna move on to learning Python 2.

None of us have learned programming before and it seemed like a big task. But as you could’ve guessed, I ended up really liking it. Over the next week, I made a few test scripts and small games, before finally releasing my first project: KAaNE, or “Keep Assisting and Nobody Explodes.” This was meant as a companion program for the game KTaNE, “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes,” which is primarily a multiplayer only game. The goal was to allow anyone to play it alone.

Of course, other apps have already existed prior to this point and can be considered a cheating software to some. But to me, in early 2018? I saw it as a really good way to learn how to develop something, while also being able to cater to a certain niche. I was even able to add some functionality still not seen in other apps (sometimes called “solvers”) - pretty much all of them only supported the native game, where as mine also included a handful of modded solvers.

This was my first script, and with that, mistakes were made. The entirety of the project is mostly one Python script, which was incredibly bloated and poorly written. Plus, it’s plastered with my old username. (Yes, that’s what “gg” stood for initially.) But overtime I iterated upon it with new versions, such as a GUI version made in Java, a version made for Android, one that was made in Qt that never got released, and a few others.

I also made a lot of other projects and drafts, most of which never saw the public light. One of which is this site, initially released on December 10th, 2019. (…okay, it hasn’t been five years since then, and over five years since my first program, but it’s close enough.)

Over time though, I gradually lost free time and motivation. I simply couldn’t open my IDE for the longest time, and I eventually got a job and tried university. In the back of my mind, I always wondered: “Is coding even my thing? Would anyone even care for what I make?” Those questions have been engrained in my mind for a long time now, and roughly two years ago, I wanted to see if anyone would care for what I do.

So, back in December of 2022, I started hosting Invidious. At the time, I was using a dedicated server shared amongst two other people. Just like with Python 4 years prior, I was going into sysadmin mostly blind. I had no idea what I was doing most of the time. Whenever a problem happened, I begged the main admin, moocow, to help me out.

8 months later, I moved out of their server and into one I rented entirely on my own. In fact, I set up three - one in New York, Seattle, and Paris. I set up more frontends, changed around the servers, set up more scripts and configs, and…

Now, we’re in the present. Well, nearly there, we’re about a month away.

Invidious was down for a few months - Google put in their latest blocks to deter any scraping from (most likely) AI models, and subsequently blocked most third-party services. But Invidious was just gearing up to workaround these, and as someone who was keeping a close eye on the situation, I implemented the patch as soon as I was able to.

When it fully released, they decided to remove any public instance that hasn’t updated it yet, and that left mine to be one of the only ones available. Not only that, it was the one of two that was primarily hosted in the US, and the fourth on the list.

…and now we’re in the present! Needless to say, we got a lot of users from that. At the time of writing, there are now 4000 users, 900 of which have been active the past month. It even managed to get into LTT’s now deleted de-google video, as Invidious was present and the instance was listed in it. (Thanks, Linus!)

4000 might not seem like a lot to some people - of course, that’s the amount of registered users, and I have how many are actively on the instance. (I don’t use any kind of analytics.) But to me, it finally served as an answer to that question. People finally care.

If you can’t tell, I’m not exactly a prolific developer or master hacker. I’m a guy working shit wages, trying to make a name for himself by hosting privacy friendly services. And while I’ve been happy just hosting them for myself for the past few years, knowing that there are people out there who use them too? Who actually benefitted from it? It’s a nice feeling, and I can’t really thank you all enough.

So as a little thank you, I’m publishing…well, a lot of things.

As you no doubt can already tell, the entire website got a new design. The previous one, while nice in some areas, lacked the overall theme that I wanted to use, which were backslashes. For those that don’t know, a backslash character, \, is used in programming to “escape” a character. It seemed fitting to use, as I wanted it to stand out, to “escape” amongst the crowd. Now with this new design, I feel like it really does do that now.

I can’t take credit for it alone, as the bulk of it was sketched by Shaheer Babar, a UI designer who specializes in these kinds of sleek designs. I of course did the coding, made tweaks, additions, and so on, but still. I highly recommend his work if you need a designer.

Along with the sleek new looks, I’ve officially published the internal server configs and scripts for the frontends under project “GLOBE”. This is intended as a way to validate the services I host, while also allowing the community to make any changes. This is also a way for anyone to host their own, so no need to rely on mine anymore. Self-hosting 15 frontends is now as simple as cloning the repo, running a script, and adding a lot of DNS records. (…I’ll be fixing init.sh to not need that over the following week.)

And speaking of frontends, this is a little bit old now, but I’ve started a proof of concept for a YouTube frontend made in Astro, called AstroTube. This uses the Invidious API as a backend and is meant to be as performant and lightweight as possible. In fact, here’s a video of it running on my New 3DS XL. (Yes, not very old, but not even Invidious runs on it.)

Besides that, I’ve also finally migrated to Mastodon, and there is now a Discord and Matrix chat room. And while I couldn’t get a prototype out in time for this post, I’m also planning on making a native client for YouTube, Invidious, Piped, and more on desktop. Stay tuned for that.

I know it isn’t terribly much, but I’m now fully dedicated to working on this again. I’ve had a lot of trouble over the past few years, but it starting to seem like I’m finally able to have something in this life. I can’t forsee the future, Invidious and other frontends will certainly die down overtime or get patched, but… regardless of what will happen, all I can say is this: Thank you. Truthfully.

By using any of the frontends I’ve hosted, and hell, reading this post and any others, I’m able to get just that little bit of motivation back. The same kind I thought died out. Over the past week alone, I’ve been working non-stop on all of the above, and while I was definitely stressed out at times… it felt good finally working on something I know people will like and use.

🍺 So here’s to roughly 5 years of this site, and roughly many more!

~ ggtyler