Insights from the survey

Jul 27, 2026

While you can still take the survey currently, I wanted to share some thoughts and other insights from the numerous responses. To start, I saw some problems occurred with Tor users and some VPN users. While some people may still see “forbidden” if they use certain IP ranges, I believe I had made the bot blocking system less prevalent. Users will only see a captcha, which will automatically pass them if they are seen as humans. Without any extra effort, you don’t need to deal with image captchas or any other complicated systems, just, a quick verify step. While it’s not a passive “Stop the bots and question the suspicious users” it is better to require manual interaction for some of the lazy bots. Therefore, you will see less of the “checking you’re a bot” page and actually use Invidious more. Enrollment of each service will take time, and results are looking good, after ironing at the small issues I had.

If there’s interest, I will open-source this solution. I was mostly inspired by seeing a solution like this one from FloatingLab which also uses Cap, but attaches to Nginx, and is not its own standalone service. Nor does it block bad actors using a ruleset.

Next, playback issues have not been fully fixed, but certainly remedied. Invidious itself was broken due to a large YouTube block, they kept a block on me even after several days of waiting, where it would on-and-off function before getting blocked again. This has seemingly not been a problem now, but, the backends were certainly still in need of fixing. The backends were using a custom solution, I had not updated the core code much, instead I tested a numerous amount of IP addresses. While some worked rather well, the constant need to recycle addresses did cause YouTube to block much more consistently because I handle a lot of concurrent traffic from many users. So, it makes sense that before my update, the address would change and your connection would drop, leading to buffering and such. Therefore, no, this is not a problem with my actual server. If these were raw connections made by my server directly to YouTube, then they’d be extremely fast due to my 10 gigabit server connection. Since they are proxied and the address, their servers and the capacity of the proxies themselves can be wildly different per connection, this had caused some of the buffering issues as well.

Instead of continuing to leave it like that, the feedback form helped me narrow down some of the actual playback issues and rewrite the backends, in return, they are much more stable. Actively watching one entire video without stopping is now much easier, as long as there isn’t too much additional congestion causing too many address changes. I have since used 100s of residential IPs and counting, which seem to be better for private Invidious servers and less for public ones, as most have been marked by YouTube at some point. The feedback wasn’t just telling me about all of your problems, many people rated my instance near-perfect to perfect ratings, and/or thanked me for the work. Of course, I thank anyone who did, it means a lot.

The other insights were pretty helpful as well. Many people rated Invidious itself well. They stated they were using it for privacy reasons, not just because YouTube’s apps were declining in quality. I had also noticed, some users had only recently moved from YouTube, and further than that, some users recently cancelled their premium subscriptions. Additionally, many people have not heard of Yattee . While the instance may not work perfectly with Yattee, because it is not the same as regular Invidious, I do recommend using it on your devices if you own Apple devices and self-hosting a server for the best experience. Since, you can deploy one single image, it is fairly easy to find hosting that works with the yt-dlp powered system found in the Yattee Server . This simply offers a better experience than currently possible for IOS users with Invidious. Additionally, it gives a comfortable viewing experience similar to how YouTube used to work, while Invidious is just a website. However, even my own viewing has been a lot of using IOS, so I understand if you are used to Invidious for that.