Invidious developers have received an email from YouTube asking them to stop offering the program. According to YouTube's legal team, they are in violation of YouTube API terms of use, which is impossible, as Invidious does not use YouTube API.

They also claim that Invidious “is being offered on invidious.io”, which is also untrue, because that website does not host any instance of Invidious. As of today there are 40 websites hosting public instances of Invidious, over which the Invidious team has no control, as Invidious uses the free AGPL license. Even if Invidious were illegal in the United States, it is hosted on the Tor network, the I2P network and in many countries, making it virtually impossible to make Invidious disappear. In addition, its code can be found on several development platforms and is on lots of computers.

Invidious has neither agreed to YouTube's API terms of service nor YouTube's terms of service. YouTube allows access to content hosted on its servers via the HTTP protocol, so Invidious is not committing a computer crime; it is simply safeguarding the right to privacy and freedom.

Google (the company that controls YouTube), on the other hand, does not respect privacy, censors, requires the use of proprietary software, exploits its users, develops artificial intelligence software for military purposes, has a huge ecological impact, to name just a few examples. That's why there are people who think that Google should be destroyed.

Fortunately, even if Invidious were to disappear, there are other free projects such as Piped, NewPipe and youtube-dl. Will Google also threaten the developers of these projects and their millions of users?

You can use yt-dlp. There are many ways to install it, one of them is with the package manager of your distro:

sudo apt install yt-dlp

To download a playlist you only have to type in a terminal yt-dlp and the URL of the playlist you want to download, and press the Enter key. For instance:

yt-dlp https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvvDxND6LkgB_5dssZod-3BET4_DFRmtU

This program not only downloads videos from YouTube, it can also download videos from many websites.

Imagine a drug that increases your stress, anxiety and leaves you mentally exhausted; a drug that not only hooks you, but leaves you drained of energy every day. Who would use such a drug? Almost everyone. That drug is called TikTok.

Feeling lonely? Don't worry, in the Trending and challenges community you'll have "friends" eager to see you acting like a retard or making a fool of yourself with an embarrassing dance.

Teenagers, children and adults act like idiots for social approval. But that doesn't hurt anyone, right? There are challenges like pouring bleach in your eyes to see if they change colour, putting on orange mould make-up, tripping someone while they jump, as in the following video:

People have died doing stupid challenges. Who's to blame? TikTok doesn't force you to use the platform, but in an extremely stressful world of anxiety and dopamine overdose, with people desperate for social approval, some seek refuge in a toxic environment. There are people who feel the need to prove to other people that they are happy, that they have a fantastic life? The reality is quite different.

Faced with family conflicts, problems at school or at work, people take refuge in TikTok, which at first glance does not look like a drug, to forget their problems. However, TikTok acts on the mesolimbic pathway, activating the brain's reward system. If watching stupid videos makes you forget about your problems and also gives you pleasure, you will watch stupid videos, and your brain will want to do it again, so you watch another video and your brain releases dopamine. Over time, the dopaminergic system adapts: at the beginning it will be enough to watch one video, but then you need to watch two, three, four... To reach the same level of pleasure as at the beginning, you will have to watch more and more videos.

On the other hand, behaviours that increase dopamine in a healthy way, such as sports and healthy eating, are tedious. These activities cannot be compared to what the big companies offer: they release your dopamine to the maximum without hardly any effort on your part, until you end up overweight, exhausted...

With social networks like TikTok you don't have to choose what you want to watch, because the algorithm chooses for you the kind of shit you like, giving it to you without you having to lift a finger. It does this for free because you are the product: their business is to keep you hooked in front of the screen so that you watch as many ads as possible. How do they do that? By gradually changing your behaviours and your way of thinking, in other words, making you dependent without you even realising it. You can't see how the algorithm that has been hyper-optimised to hook you works, but you can watch the following video and do things that encourage other people to spend more time on the platform, like commenting and liking. You are a used, not a user.

That's why you've spent whole days doing practically nothing and you are always so tired, bored, discouraged, stressed, sad, unmotivated, irritated, weakened... hooked.

Is it TikTok that is making people sick? TikTok is a reflection of our society, a sick society, deluded by the false happiness of social media, fed up with the world. Social networks know many things about you, but you don't know anything about them, because they are proprietary programs. There are free social networks, but they can also be quite toxic.

To get out of addiction you can try dopamine detoxification, that is, reducing your use of social media and engaging in activities that require effort and do not give you immediate pleasure. This can be done gradually to make it easier.

Of course, social networks can also be useful, but they should be used in moderation. Ideally, they should be free and respectful of privacy. They should not encourage addiction, which is exactly what TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and other social networks do.

Just like Invidious, Piped offers a free and privacy-friendly to YouTube.

The advantage of Piped is that it works with SponsorBlock, so you don't waste time putting up with sponsored parts of videos. I've only mentioned the features I find most useful; a more detailed list is available on the project page.

Some disadvantages compared to Invidious are that it does not allow you to sort the videos of a channel according to age or popularity, but simply shows the latest videos of the channel; there is no button to download videos and audio; you do not see a thumbnail of the frame when hovering the mouse over the timeline; the thumbnail of the video does not appear when sharing a link...