Author of Piped here.

I think it is quite unlikely for YouTube to implement a DRM for watching videos. In anyways, we will keep fighting collaboratively as long as we can.

The most likely way YouTube probably will affect us currently is if they decide to log in wall their platform like how Twitter did.

Readily available content for everybody is the whole reason YouTube got so big.

So either the world would riot because YT is so popular, or the world would accept its fate, because YT is so popular.

Which one is it going to be? You decide

But then again, the overwhelming majority of people don't even know that there's other ways to watch YT

You think YouTube will stop Tor users? That's blocking them from hundreds of millions of users whose internet blocks YouTube without TorBrowseer.

Don't worry, big evil corporations wouldn't shut out such huge market segments.

my current guess is: this problem will mostly fix itself

youtube-ads are ridiculous. I wouldn't consume these as they are now. If I'm forced to use that site without sponsorblock and adblock, I'm tending to just never watching anything there.

So if NewPipe/Sponsorblock (and of course NewPipe+Sponsorblock) are gone, then I won't use that shit anymore and don't feel any pain.

Same as with reddit. The last weeks I visited when pointed to reddit by some search enigne, but not out of "I could browse it for fun". I didn't miss anything. Twitter? Not even trying to visit that shithole anymore, since most links are unreadable anyways.

If platforms are closing down, they will lose my interactions. More free time for me!

Newpipe doesn't use YouTube's api to play videos, and it plays videos from pretty much any service that uses embedded video like YouTube does. I dont think its going anywhere anytime soon.

I wish that this risk encouraged people to migrate out of YouTube. Specially content creators. PeerTube could get a bit more people.

While it lasts, what is a good adfree foss yt player on ios?

What about yt-dlp I wonder? Can we still scrap videos after this?

It WILL break legacy and underpowered devices, so its likely they won't at least not too soon. Those apps rely on the files hosted on the googlevideo servers, and most that are used are meant for legacy browsers.