I use LibreTube and it looks like half of the instances keep getting shut down and then get back up, and the speeds for all are atrociously slow that it is just better to watch it on YouTube on Firefox. I heard a while ago YouTube was blocking certain Piped instances but do not know if that is the same case right now.
I bet for the owners of public instances, it must be a constant fight against YouTube’s IP banning or rate limiting.
If you have the resources, you could self-host your own private instance for you and your friends or family. I haven’t had performance issue with my private instance so far.
What makes this extra confusing to me, is that this doesn’t seem to happen to the same extent for Invidious instances. I’ve only needed to swap between two instances on Clipious, whereas on LibreTube I was hopping across their entire instance list and sometimes not finding even one working instance.
Yea it’s a bummer because I love LibreTubes UI compared to NewPipes outdated UI but it looks like I might have to switch to NewPipe
If it helps, the NewPipe developers have been working on a full rewrite of the app, but I don’t know when it will come out.
That said, I would probably use invidious in browsers. I haven’t really had any problems with it whereas I’ve had nothing but issues with Piped for months.
It seems like on Invidious, the default setting is to still have the end user load the video directly from YouTube, whereas Piped defaults to proxying the video through its server as well. I would imagine this makes Piped servers a lot more noticable to YouTube.