Successful public listing of my Invidious server

Part of the process when making my Invidious instance was to eventually put it in the public list of instances, since I rarely ever published or talked about the stuff I do beyond what I am already familiar with. This allowed me to make a public server that people could actively use and gives people more options.

When I made the compose file, which is now like 500 lines, I really just aimed to customize it because customization is fun and to make it fast. On my daily computer, regular YouTube is slow. I usually end up using my TV or something. Plus, using it has gotten worse over time. I was a premium user, but I stopped paying, and I forgot how many ads there were. I understand people already had public instances, but this was my cool way of providing back to something I had used for a while.

With some hiccups and other weird quirks, I was able to successfully list my Invidious instance today, and it is now part of the official list.

There’s always some work to do, but after perfecting it since October, I was glad to share the instance with the world and was surprised at the initial influx of traffic.

According to the dashboard, yesterday, the day in which it was listed, saw a traffic spike of nearly 2 MILLION requests ! That’s astronomical, certainly never like anything I’ve ever hosted. Beyond that, I severed about 200 gigs of content. This is mixed and could be a variety of data. But, I’m sure a good chunk of that was just Invidious alone. I posted my “historic achievement” on Bluesky

Some of the fun things I did for my instance was:

• Set up bot blocking
• Worked on CSS (the file is from NerdVPN)
• Have fun
• Docker Compose

I like Docker but hosting this so well has made me like it just a tad more. Although, a portion of content is cached, I still enjoyed making everything. I’d recommend Docker any day when it’s not having difficulties, some of which I ran into when making the service.

The only issue was my rate limiting being too aggressive. Sorry, I was used to normal web traffic, so hopefully you weren’t hit too hard by stray rate limit blocking.

Since then, I moved off of Cloudflare as the inital influx went down. The instance is much more stable but the inital load, which went all the way up to 4 million requests was thankfully guarded by Cloudflare during that time. If there were any bots or attackers, they would’ve left after seeing how locked down it was.

If you’d like to track the status of my instance, you can view its status page . And if you’d like to help me continue hosting, consider supporting me . Currently, I have the Buy Me a Coffee button widget on my site, along with XMR and BTC. I won’t add that to Invidious itself. However, on my own website it’s okay. Sadly, the button does not seem to be very accessible! I will have to make my own little button, or maybe I can email and ask if maybe I have it configured wrong. Please be aware of this when visiting the site for now. I will post more minor stuff on the Bluesky app and potentially other similar social media like places in case I ever get a chance to.