[Bug] "This helps protect our community."

[ggtylerr]

EDIT by @unixfox: The Invidious team is aware of this issue. It appears that it affects all the software using YouTube.
Please refrain from commenting if you have nothing new to bring up. Thank you.

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Describe the bug
This seems to be another block by YouTube - happens on any video, regardless of settings or instance.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Go to any video on Invidious

Logs
No logs on browser. In docker logs:

invidious-invidious-refresh-1  | 2024-06-06 22:35:23 UTC [error] get_video: PrMRuA3pd7g : This helps protect our community. Learn more
invidious-invidious-refresh-1  | 2024-06-06 22:35:23 UTC [warn] i18n: Missing translation key "This helps protect our community. Learn more"

Screenshots

Additional context
This seems to be a global update, done before 22:23 UTC. (10:23 PM.) From my brief testing, this is present throughout all instances, and regardless of IPv6 address.

EDIT: It looks like this is just rolling out throughout all servers, so some may not be affected yet.

[ggtylerr]

Okay, it's clear this isn't global yet and it's a standard YouTube rollout. Please refrain from posting "i'm affected/not affected" comments :)

[Sommerwiesel]

They are probably A/B testing this, I just (programmatically) did 200 requests on my instance and roughly 1/3 of them returned this bug, the other times, the video loaded just fine.
This will most likely get worse the next days, so brace yourself for another downtime of all instances.

[ggtylerr]

Update: Cobalt seems to have fixed this by implementing a token system: imputnet/cobalt#551

I don't recommend this since it'd be easy to overload (ex: nitter) but it is an option, would be good for temporary use.

[m0istn00dl]

This isn't just happening on invidious instances and third party apps, I've been getting this message trying to watch videos directly off of YTs website from the DDG app on my phone.

[ggtylerr]

Oh or maybe @m0istn00dl got their IP banned previously by using Invidious or something so youtube.com won't work until they get unbanned.

Nope. It's pretty much confirmed at this point that basically every client is being blocked and requiring a sign in. Including YouTube's own clients. The only exception found thus far seems to be the TV client (although I could be wrong on this.)

Why exactly this is the case is something only Google can answer - whether it's meant to directly hinder frontends / third-party clients, to prevent unknown (i.e. hard to track) users that don't sign in, or if it's a test to see how much the userbase would be affected by the change. No real way to find out for sure until Google makes some other moves.

(Oh, and also, Google has no way of telling whether an IP visited Invidious, unless you accessed it from their search engine or something. That IP ban claim is ridiculous.)

[unixfox]

@that404nerd that is not a chat discussion. I said to refrain from writing some comments if you have nothing new to bring up.

If you or anyone else want to discuss freely about the issue then join our matrix (https://matrix.to/#/#invidious:matrix.org) or IRC (https://web.libera.chat/?channel=#invidious)

[unixfox]

I'm locking this GitHub issue because people can't follow the rules, stating that we should keep this issue clean from unnecessary comments.

If you want to react to this issue and bring up new things, please join our Matrix room or IRC. And if you have useful knowledge to share in this issue, you can create a separate GitHub issue and link it to this one.