Why yewtu.be was down? (July 2023)

what-happened-downtime-july2023.md

On the 30th of June, my cloud provider, Oracle Cloud, decided to shutdown all my servers hosted on two Oracle Cloud accounts.
It is known that this provider will randomly ban accounts without any reason.

Why yewtu.be doesn't accept new registrations nor logging into an account?

Unfortunately and this is 100% my fault for forgetting that, I only had data duplication between servers located in the two Oracle Cloud accounts and no backups.
I thought that I wouldn't get all my accounts in trouble at the same time and able to recover the data from one of the two accounts but unfortunately this turned out otherwise.

Implementing some backup was something I had in my notes for a long time but I think I forgot about it, maybe due to the huge amount of work I spend on the open source projects.
I'm deeply sorry if you have lost your subscriptions list or playlists or watch history. I did try to contact Oracle Cloud for recovering the data, I'm waiting for their answer but you should be certain that they will most likely ignore me.

So as of now and in order to not have the responsability of keeping the data of my users somewhere safe I won't accept new registrations on yewtu.be. You can use yewtu.be normally like before but without an account.
If you are looking for making an account on Invidious, please use other instances: https://instances.invidious.io or install Invidious locally on your computer: https://docs.invidious.io/installation/

Why it took so long for yewtu.be to be available again?

Well first I had to find new servers, set up them. I have a complex infrastructure for handling the many users that I receive every day.

Second that was something I have wanted to do for a long time. Rework from scratch my infrastructure for an easier way of managing it.
In more technical terms, rework my Kubernetes infrastructure.

(Finally mentally recover from all of these events, especially the lost of my users data, by going on a hike for a full day)

Thanks for your effort!

It is known that this provider will randomly ban accounts without any reason.
[...]
I did try to contact Oracle Cloud for recovering the data, I'm waiting for their answer but you should be certain that they will most likely ignore me.

That's called being an asshole. It's our data. This is their Twitter — you all know what to do.

Thank you so much for running this instance! It is such a convenience for me and my friends!

Hey I've been using the instance for quite some time now.
As others, I've been mindful of the volatile nature of such types of front-ends so I've been regularly doing my due diligence and backing up my data.

In my humble opinion no sane user would really expect any kind of data integrity from a service like this so practically wipes like these aren't to be unexpected or particularly rare so all and all this isn't a big deal. But in practice disallowing such an essential part of UX like allowing people to have user feeds etc will practically render yewtu.be unusable for a large portion of the userbase.

So to sum up, nobody pays for SLA and you aren't really required to maintain indefinite backups, but if you ask me the decision to remove accounts altogether actually makes for a much worse platform for everyone weather their delusional enough to demand SLA or not. Please reconsider your decision, I feel like its much more drastic than it needs to be and it doesn't really benefit anyone in the end of the day. You shouldn't take any responsibility for our data, just let us enjoy the instance as is, we'll take care of the rest =)

Everybody should have their subscriptions backed up on other Invidious instances, Piped instances, Newpipe app, etc. Put the json on a filehost. There is no reason to just depend on Yewtube.

The thing is, I made a backup of my subscriptions, but now it is useless. Why don't you allow me to login and restore it ?

Thanks for the explanation and all the work you put in to maintain this instance. Certainly wouldn't hold your breath for any accountability from a the likes of Oracle, but that's why it's good to support these types of projects.

Thanks for the service you provided and provide to the community. It could be a response from Oracle to Google's false accusation of misusing their API - they probably rather give in to wrong accusations from corps waving with expensive lawyers than spend time cross-checking source code with with API guidelines.

@uohmak4fvpqe You can use another Invidious instance in the meanwhile. The data format for Invidious is same across instances (unless there's major modifications), so it works even on other instances.

For those wanting to keep subscription on their favorite YT channels, I think a better solution would be using some RSS reader, such as Feedly. At least this is what I do. Google still (for now at least, who knows the future), offers RSS support for youtube channels. So you can just see all new videos without having to worry with the instances. To sweet the deal you might instal Redirector to redirect the youtube link to your favorite Invidious instance.

If I may ask: where are you hosting now?

RIP yewtu.be. Clearly by design, but regardless, thank you mr fox for all the monies and effort you've put into it. Trully appreciate.

I'm sad that I lost my subscriptions. But I don't want you to feel bad about it. I am thankful for the while it lasted. :-)

oracle cloud?

why do you host your stuff on CIA's servers?

Thank you.
You rock.

Keep going, your instance is among the best! Thanks for hosting :)

And you can't store data of your EU users on the US servers

https://umbraco.com/about-us/trust-center/privacy-and-umbraco/gdpr-and-umbraco/gdpr/storage-of-data-outside-the-eu/

+1 to the "thanks so much we love you" vibe

I didn't have an account on this instance, but since this happened I might as well leave a tip to the people impacted, so that in the future you can be ready for this kind of incident.

It happens that various Invidious instances that I use, being them services hosted by hobbyists without any profit, go down for days and maybe all user data is lost. So since many months ago I have this command on my Raspberry Pi that runs at night (but you could as well run it manually on your PC or smartphone):

curl \
	"${Invidious_Instance_URL}/subscription_manager?action_takeout=1&format=json" \
	-H "${Invidious_Backup_Cookie}" \
	> "./Invidious-Backup/$(date +%F).json"

Variable Invidious_Backup_Cookie should be equal to Cookie: SID=[...], you take this from the browser's request cookies after logging into an Invidious instance (it's you secret session key, don't share it).

With this I have peace of mind knowing that if one instance explodes, I have a backup ready I can import on another one!

oracle cloud?

why do you host your stuff on CIA's servers?

Can you elaboerate why and how oracle is connected to the cia?

https://peakd.com/hive-129614/@antisocialist/arcane-books-the-pentagons-brain-ch1

This book does a pretty good job of explaining how 'big tech' was built by the usg.

can you open registration anyway? Here's why it's a good idea to do so:

1. People like invidious mostly because they can have some type of subscription without having a Youtube account, so an invidious instance without registration isn't as useful.
2. The database was lost before and I think we all understand it could happen again. You are not obliged to keep data safe if you're not getting paid to do so.
3. We can always have a backup somewhere else. I personally use 3 instances anyway just for uptime so I had my subscriptions already backed up on 2 other instances, but I'd like to use yours regularly again as well. Right now I don't because I don't have registration here.

Hope you bring back registration. Thanks.

Sorry this happened to you. But thank you for your efforts in hosting this. Has been really helpful until I can get around to hosting it myself.

Totally agree with @Pentaphon, without registration it is not so useful for me. It would be better to have registration enabled again even if it is not 100% safe. Users just will take care of that as @andrigamerita suggests, for example. And big thanks for hosting this instance anyways!

Totally agree with Pentaphon, without registration it is not so useful for me. It would be better to have registration enabled again even if it is not 100% safe. Users just will take care of that as andrigamerita suggests, for example. And big thanks for hosting this instance anyways!

Thanks, @a-litsov I do think this is the best course of action. @yewtudotbe should not stress out about the database because it happens to projects like this and we understand the risks. The instance is much better off with registration enabled since that is half the part of using Youtube and disabling registration just discourages people from using his instance. I hope he changes his mind.

why did you disable the popular tab? I always recommended to friends that wanted to learn more about technology
thanks for the great contribution though! Amazing job

Hi Emilien,

Thank you very much for pointing that out. +1 on adding the accounts back in, but I also understand why you can't do it. I'll make sure my donations keep coming. I know it's not much, but I hope it still helps.

Thanks for everything you provide to the FOSS community. 💞

Hi Emilien,

Thank you very much for pointing that out. +1 on adding the accounts back in, but I also understand why you can't do it. I'll make sure my donations keep coming. I know it's not much, but I hope it still helps.

I'm sad that I lost my subscriptions. But I don't want you to feel bad about it. I am thankful for the while it lasted. :-)

Btw it is still here but Is it backed up into another instance?

why did you disable the popular tab?

@foodornt Popular videos are based on subscriptions of the registered users in the instance

Thanks you so much for putting the work to keep it alive!

can you open registration anyway? Here's why it's a good idea to do so:

1. People like invidious mostly because they can have some type of subscription without having a Youtube account, so an invidious instance without registration isn't as useful.
2. The database was lost before and I think we all understand it could happen again. You are not obliged to keep data safe if you're not getting paid to do so.
3. We can always have a backup somewhere else. I personally use 3 instances anyway just for uptime so I had my subscriptions already backed up on 2 other instances, but I'd like to use yours regularly again as well. Right now I don't because I don't have registration here.

Hope you bring back registration. Thanks.

You can create a temporary playlist without registration on YouTube with the following url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch_videos?video_ids=" add the video IDs (the string after "v=") to the end with no spaces, with a comma in between & paste the url into the address bar. I believe you can substitute an invidious instance for the YouTube domain too, & it will still work.

There's a site "https://www.playlist.ws/" that will do it for you through drag & drop. You can even save playlists on the site & they can be backed up (JSON, I think). You can even give it a name.

edit: the site layout has changed. There doesn't seem to be a backup option & restore doesn't work, but you can still back them up in a text file, or as bookmarks.