First time this happens to me. With a German protonvpn server.
I don’t believe anyone mentioned this yet so… here goes nothing, there is a suspicion that this is due to A/B testing
This is a bug report from the Invidious project; this is back in June 6 (so four months ago), but the hoster of a fairly large instance noted a very bizarre error message on the Invidious project…
Conclusion is that Youtube is very likely rolling out A/B testing of requiring all clients to login before viewing videos
Refreshing will probably work considering this is most likely result of an A/B test, but unfortunately I don’t see a way of this problem going away
Invidious public instances have been completely blocked by this, it’s no longer AB testing. IDK exactly what triggers it but, too many requests from the same ip is going to show this now… maybe OP vpn exits with an ip shared by too many…
“Protecting our community” isn’t even a good excuse, you can’t leave comments without an account…
Protecting our
communityprofits
Bots can’t watch videos anymore? Anti-droid discrimination
This has always gone away for me when I change my location in my vpn.
Oh that’s how they broke invidious
This is the result of them blocking invidious. They targeted large Datacenter nodes and check for the number of requests from those datacenters that aren’t logged in, and block them until that number meets a certain threshold. This also causes people with VPNs to get this message. The solution is to connect to smaller self-hosted invidious instances or using proxies hosted on normal residential ips.
Been seeing that a fair bit too lately. Freetube, Grayjay, and Newpipe seem so sometimes get around it, even if the error is in the browser the video will sometimes load in those apps from the same IP. If you get lucky and find a working invidious/piped instance that might work too.
Otherwise, turning on a VPN and switching between servers will usually eventually lead to a working one. That, and if you’re up for it, check to see if your favorite creators are on places like Peertube, Odysee, or Rumble that don’t block IPs like YouTube does.
I get why I got downvoted for having posted a YouTube link on !OshiNoKo@lemmy.world
the stupidest thing about this is that I literally am signed into youtube (yeah yeah, I know), and I still get this shit!
It’s a VPN thing. I have a work VPN that gives me the same error on piped API front ends like piped.video
If I use my regular device without a VPN the alt front ends work fine.
This can be a soft limit where Youtube limits the connection rate so that artificially inflating view count becomes more costly. There are inexpensive ‘services’ especially in India or Pakistan where you can buy human (like a whole internet cafe) view times to your scam video to make it float in suggestions and to promote a channel.
I don’t work for youtube so it is just a guess.
SmartTube, my go-to way to watch, is having issues again today too. I presume it is to make people subscribe to YouTube premium but my first thought was to use Nebula instead.
Sometimes I get that prompt while on vpn. After refreshing the page, I’m able to see the video.
As much as it isn’t preferred, I can usually bypass the sign in shenanigans by going directly to the website to watch something without signing in. I usually only get the login prompt when going through my browser or a search engine.
I got it on an embedded video for a news site. VPN on of course.
I get it on reddit :/
Redlib is a handy accountless frontend for reddit that still works
Redlib
Thanks will be very handy when I get reddit llink in search result and can not open it
That’s what I mean though, trying to watch any YT video embedded anywhere without being signed in will yield that error, but I usually don’t have that problem on YT’s direct website, even without login. Still ridiculous, but so is Google
You’re on Android use NewPipe and it’s forks, personally I prefer Tubular and PipePipe.
Periodically YouTube will break, but both of those forks, as well as new pipe prime, update fairly quickly.
GrayJay is interesting… It has different feel and feature set than newpipe, but it’s worth using. I will say I get more login errors with GrayJay, but closing the app and reopening it resolves them immediately.
All the piped apps will be in f-droid/droidify, you can download GrayJay directly, or just scan the QR to add the repo to a FOSS repo manager.
You will have the same issue with NewPipe.
I use both of them everyday. I’m using one of them right now.
Haven’t had that issue.
They are right. If you have that problem, the reason is that those fuckers at Google block your VPN. It will not help to use an alternative app.
Afaik grayjay has some blocking circumvention.
And personally FreeTube worked from the same IP, when regular youtube wanted me to log in.