I selfhosted Invidious a while back, but gave up on it when it stopped working and I couldn't figure out why. I have no experience with Piped.

I settled on a third alternative, but I don't want to point too much attention to it because I think it might be flying under Youtubes' radar at the moment. But let me say this: if you embed a youtube video on a third party site and have it be part of a playlist with only the video in it, you won't see any ads. so for example I'd be embedding a link like this: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/dQw4w9WgXcQ?playlist=dQw4w9WgXcQ&vq=hd1080&autoplay=1&modestbranding=1&rel=0 on my own page and can then watch it without ads :) if you have any questions, feel free to hit me up.

EDIT: Well, I just got the first ad using this method. So it seems youtube is cracking down on all ad avoidance methods and they found this one too. Only one ad so far, so it doesn't seem to be as bad as their own site, with (sometimes multiple) ads before almost every video, but I'm sure it'll happen. Guess Piped/Invidious it is!

I'm selfhosting invidious for a few users (5), only downside is it have to be restarted every once in a while to clean up the db (cron every one hour did the trick pretty well). Very usable on every video :-)

Viewtube was pretty easy to get running. Their rocker container started up almost right away.

The only problem I have with them, is that it doesn’t seem to import my YouTube subscriptions.

I use the Piped instance piped.adminforge.de and it works well enough. How popular a video is doesn't make a difference but sometimes nothing will load for like half an hour or something. That's fairly rare tho.

I run a private invidious instance, it's been bliss amidst all the adblock threats from YouTube. Hope it never stops working, I would quit on YouTube for good if it did.

I just set up Piped a few days ago, it was pretty simple to set up. The documentation in general is pretty shit, but there's enough info on how to set up the docker-compose, the script it runs is pretty good.

I use it remotely at my farm over Starlink, pulling from the homelab that has a hardwired 150 down/15mbps upload speed, and it seems to work fine as a client. I put it behind a reverse proxy with basic auth to prevent randos from accessing it.

Edit: so I've gotten down to using it and there's a lot I like about it vs. Youtube. Your feed is just your subs, nothing else. If you watch a video, you can set it in your prefs to not show it again in your feed. And you can just hit the Listen icon on an item and it'll only play the audio. There is absolutely nothing extraneous in your feed.

Trending is just the default view a non-logged in user would see on Youtube. It's pretty useless. There is no algo for suggesting videos, so i you rely on that to get new content that's likely to appeal to you, that's not going to work well. If you watch a vid, it will include the Related videos you would see on the YT page, so maybe you can get some non-subbed content that way. Otherwise, it's all search to find new stuff. Which I'm ok with, I find I'll just hare off following the algo and waste a bunch of time watching half of a buncch of vids that I really didn't want to see. This keeps it focussed on my actual feed.

I would like to be able to sleep items in my feed but I don't see an option for that.

I self host a personal Piped instance, and it works without issues for me. The videos load just as quickly as on YT itself, and the UI feels faster because it's not as bloated. Setting it up was fairly easy too, I just had to customize and run the docker compose config they provide.