Why did I create Piped?
YouTube has an extremely invasive privacy policy which relies on using user data in unethical ways.
Here are some things about YouTube:
- Tracking via third-party cookies for other purposes without your consent.
- YouTube can delete your content if you violate the terms
- Reduction of legal period for cause of action
- YouTube may use your personal information for marketing purposes
- YouTube can view your browser history
- YouTube can use your content for all their existing and future services
- YouTube gathers information about you through third parties
- YouTube can license user content to third parties
- YouTube provider makes no warranty regarding uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free service
- Deleted videos are not really deleted
- Your data may be processed and stored anywhere in the world
- YouTube is only available to users over a certain age
- YouTube can suspend your account for several reasons
- YouTube has non-exclusive use of your content
- The court of law governing the terms is in the US
- YouTube collects your IP address for location use
Source: https://tosdr.org/en/service/274
A lot of inspiration came from NewPipe and Invidious.
I created Piped to fix issues in NewPipe and Invidious which are architectural issues and cannot be fixed easily.
NewPipe
- Your IP is exposed to YouTube.
- Feeds are slow to load/update in comparison to YouTube.
Invidious
- Uses way too much resources.
- Total bandwidth limited by the peak capacity of the load balancer.
- Coded in Crystal, a language that is relatively hard for beginners.
- Caching is done at a backend level.
- Invidious was a learning project.
- Invidious crashes all the time.
- Various hacks are required to keep an instance running at a reasonable stability.
However, there are some drawbacks of Piped:
- JavaScript is required
- Browsers without Service-Workers support will feel significantly slower. Eg: Tor Browser