Good to hear that :) Inviting the bot definitely helps it reach more communities, so thanks for that!

I would try looking at the JavaScript console for errors, and the network tab for issues with requests. Something seems oddly wrong, unfortunately.

There shouldn’t be any, is this on iOS for the setup?

You can find more information at https://feddit.rocks/comment/39147, it tries to look all over Lemmy, but doesn’t have enough communities to scan :/

You can now try sending it a message mentioning communities in the format !community@instance.tld and it will try joining it :)

Piped can be more privacy friendly in a few cases, as you don’t need an account for subscriptions or playlists.

Here are some differences to Invidious:

• Subscriptions don’t necessarily require an account
• Playlists don’t necessarily require an account
• Piped supports Infinite scrolling
• Piped supports Webm videos
• Piped can stream videos from Odysee if the same video is available there.
• Piped is a lot lighter on the server
• Piped always proxies your traffic to Google’s servers (most Invidious servers don’t proxy videos to YouTube by default)
• Piped has SponsorBlock integrated (DeArrow will be added soon)
• Piped has ReturnYouTubeDislike support via RYD-Proxy
• Piped can only be self-hosted on a server. Invidious on the other hand can work fine on local networks.
• Piped is a lot easier to administer than Invidious as an instance operator.

I’ll conclude by saying that I was once an Invidious user. I decided to write Piped at a time when Invidious was riddled with extremely odd bugs and performance issues. Some of these issues still persist to this day. I’ve always kept performance a top priority in Piped. I wanted to create a better alternative to YouTube than Invidious for my use case and threat model. I think I have succeeded in that :)

Is Piped something that you have to self host

No, you don’t have to self-host it. You have a large number of public instances hosted generously by people! You may want to however self-host it however if you don’t live close to an instance, or want to actually own your own data.

Are there instances out there that this redirects to or a single server?

You can switch instances directly from the preferences page. You don’t need to change your URL for switching instances.

Is it a sort of P2P thing where different servers host different videos or parts of different videos?

No, Piped has no P2P aspects at all. What you describe is technically infeasible/difficult since we don’t store videos at all, just proxying them.

How will this be affected by Youtube cracking down on adblockers?

Time will tell, so far we aren’t affected. But, we could be affected when it fully rolls out rather than as an A/B test.

You’re welcome! Now, anyone who creates a post/comment with a YouTube link will know about it too :)