Hi everyone,
I am thinking about self-hosting Invidious just for personal use in one household. So this will generate of course much less traffic than the public hosted ones with probably hundreds or thousands videos watched in a short timeframe.
However, I read that it is not unusual for Invidous instances to get IP banned and I wonder if this is more a problem with the public instances or if someone here hosts it just for itself and had to cope with that too.
To be precise: The plan is to self-host it in my homelab, accessible only from the LAN for the few people living here.
I do this exact thing and after a year or so of running my invidious instance locally I’m not banned and never had any issues and I use it about 5 hours per day give or take. Hope this helps.
Oh wow, that is a lot more usage than I can think of for all of us here, haha! Thank you very much. That sounds very promising.
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I have been self-hosting a local Invidious instance for several months. I watch videos from it every day and I’ve had no IP ban so far.
Thank you for your feedback! I get the impression that it might work if used on a small scale when it´s not public. I guess I will have a new container soon :-)
What’s the benefit of self hosting it? Is it just the ui or are there any privacy benefits?
One reason is because I can. And because of that, I tend to host things myself which I can. This generates cost and work to maintain it on my side and not for others. A few less users from our household on a public instance means more room for others who are just not as tech-savvy and have no other choice as to rely on public instances. So it is a mix of respecting other peoples time, effort and money and a part is just the nerd that wants to find out how it works and how it´s done :-)
For me, I know it doesn’t offer much privacy if its locally hosted, but the latency compared to using public instances is much better. Which may sound stupid, but at least I also don’t have to depend on another person for their instance.
I self-host Piped and Invidious in containers with networking plumbed to glueton[1] on a VPN.
This way all traffic going to youtube from piped/invidious comes from the VPN, and can easily switch regions/providers if there’s service degradation. Also mixes traffic with other VPN users to lower fingerprinting.
This patterns works well with almost any self-hosted service.
I really need to sit down and figure out how to do this.