It’s 2023 and there are more open source, decentralized social media options than ever before like Lemmy, Mastodon, and more. However, I still find myself using some big tech platforms like Twitter and Google News fairly often. While federated social networks are compelling, the content curation and discovery on platforms like Twitter seems better for my interests. The echo chambers of Twitter feel preferable to the noise of something like Mastodon. What about you all? Have you moved completely to open source social platforms, or do you still rely on some big tech ones too? I’m curious to hear your perspectives!
I do watch videos from YouTube because of its massive content, but I tend to use invidious or piped links - because I don’t want to provide YT any more traffic than they need.
Could you please explain what piped links do exactly? I see them here all the time but they rarely work for me. I’d like to understand
I will try to do an ELI5.
Piped is what is known as a “proxy”, or rather an interface to YouTube.
There is a very popular piece of code called NewPipeExtractor, which is used to scrape data from the YouTube website.
Piped utilizes NewPipeExtractor to set up an “intermediary”, a proxy website that looks and feels pretty much like YouTube.
The good thing about watching videos through the Piped proxy site is that YouTube doesn’t get to know your IP address. Which is why it is very popular among privacy advocates.
That is it in a nutshell. If interested, you will find more information in their GitHub page.
https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped
Hope this helped.
Thanks a lot! This is very helpful indeed