Invidious Creator Steps Away From Open Source

Recently Omar Roth, creator of Invidious, announced his stepping down from Invidious lead developer as well as open source as a whole. He cited the mental toll and other reasons for the same. This also result in shutting down of official Invidious instance, invidio.us. Invidious had largely been a one man project (though occasional contributions by others were made).

Majority of FOSS projects usually begin as hobby project or something that solved a problem faced by the creator. A few blows up which sometimes lead to burnouts for the creators/developers/contributors if possible load balancing is not done.

As of now, Perflyst (from Snopyta) has been promoted to project owner status by Omar. Perflyst replied -

Please note that I am not a developer. Therefore, I will most likely not be able to implement breaking changes from YouTube in Invidious.

I will do my best to manage the issue section and to answer questions. Previous code collaborations were also invited to the GitHub organization.

— Perflyst¹

That leaves behind the need of contributors who could solve breakages if anything changes from YouTube’s side, do bug fixes and take the project forward. A major issue is that Invidious is written in Crystal and not many developer know or use. Though it leaves the playing field open for someone to jump in. Another thing that if it had been a closed source software and invidio.us was the only instance, Invidious would have been lost forever which might not be the case now as we have multiple public instances running, some accessible via TOR hidden services too.

PS: Here’s a great comment on the alternatives for viewing YouTube. As of now, I would switch my Invidious embeds away from invidio.us to probably Snopyta’s instance.