The website http://astronaut.io/ does a similar thing but for recent videos, and not just from iPhones. From the home page:
> These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).
At one point you might be at a school recital in Malaysia, and the next minute you are at a birthday in Ecuador. It's amazing!
There's something magical when one location becomes the default for something. A site like this would be impossible if YouTube wasn't the place for videos.
It's why I'm sad that we no longer have one obvious default for microblogging. It was such a rich source of thoughts. That's all gone now.
iiuc your argument, it would be more accurate to phrase it as: mastodon, lemmy, and other federated social protocols are like archipelagos of small islands.
Mastodon contains several sub federations that near automatically ban each other’s users… So a very tribal and extremely violent archipelago of small islands…
Twitter still exists. Renamed. Same exact thing. You can create an account and post whatever random things you want. Some people might follow you. Some might not. If you see something that makes you sad, you can block the person who posted the sad thing.
It very much is not. No third-party clients; can’t see threads without an account; owner inserting himself and his ideology at the centre; fewer and less diverse participating people; diminished trust in the platform; more spam; different verification rules… Even the character limit is different.
Not just aggregating data for fun. It made third-party clients like Tweetbot impossible. Similar to non-old.reddit.com, the web interface has been crappy for a pretty long time, but was easily worked around by using better clients.
There are thousands of bluecheck AI bots that just copy-paste/regurgitate or just make up stupid content and post it continuously to get engagement views and money.
You don’t need to follow someone to see their content. When you open the app the default timeline is the “For You” one. Sometimes you don’t even notice that the app has switched back to “For You”, X definitely doesn’t really want you staying on the “Following” tab.
"Popular" tweets (of which these bot accounts often fall into, because they're propped up by bot responses and engagement farming) are pushed into your feed even if you're not following (or engaging) with them.
This site has the cookie permissions dialog which has "reject all", but I think this rejects only the "opt-in" cookies.
The "legitimate interest" cookies, which are equally comprehensive but are on a different tab, are not rejected by this, and to reject them you have to turn each one of them off by hand, scrolling down a massive list.
If you select "reject all", the dialog instantly closes, I think with the legitimate interest cookies all in use - but I can't check, because I know of no way to get the dialog back up again, which is why I'm saying "I think".
When sites pop this one up, I leave - and notably, The Register, the UK news site, started using it a year or so ago.
I enabled the uBlock Origin Annoyances filter to block most of those cookie popups. It's not enabled by default. Clicking "reject all" has no practical effect on my privacy. If I wanted to keep something secret, I'd use e2e encryption instead of making websites do a pinkie promise
The issue is the duplicitous nature of the consent form.
If the consent form itself is like that, then you already have no trust in the site, let alone asking the question of whether or not a non-duplicitous consent form could or could not be trusted.
I think usually the standard wording for this option would be something like "Reject all non-essential cookies" and they left out the second part of that sentence. I'm not saying it's OK but maybe it's a mistake that was done in good faith.
GP is alluding to the fact that several tracking networks will place their cookies in the "legitimate interest" category, because the rationale is that them making money by monetizing user data is their "legitimate" moneymaking interest.
There's not a lot of good faith in that, and it's arguably not valid according to GDPR.
Insecam is truly a pearl among websites, when you’re in your feels at 3 am on a random (work)day and then you can look at somewhere at the opposite side of the world that’s already going through the day, maybe it’s already noon there or something.
There is / was also r/DeepIntoYoutube which was dedicated to good videos that only had a handful of views.
It reminds me of this grandma that played Skyrim for ages but never had any views, but thanks to one of these discover pages, she got a following of tens of thousands.
And before that it was a neat trick to find obscure images in your favorite search engine. "Index of" is/was also a good keyword to get at file listings.
Found Footage Festival on Youtube does the same thing. They have fans of the show "mine" for img's and submit interesting/weird/funny ones. It's part of their bi-weekly shows where they review weird and interesting VHS tapes and old public access shows.
I only ever watch youtube or view web pages in incognito/guest mode or other browser profile that deletes all cookies when I close it (which I do at the end of every day).
I watched a few videos then opened YouTube in another tab and checked my watch history. It doesn't show the videos from this site. I think in general it doesn't track embeds from other sites.
if anyone know the person who maintains that site or if that person reads this: this site would be massively improved if the speed of the ISS footage playing in the background were simply slowed down a little. right now it gives this feeling of rocketing forward which is a very different vibe from the premise of the site. the user should float slowly to emphasize the thoughtful nature of the activity and enjoy the sensation of watching the world go by.
I just opened it in incognito in Chrome on Android
noticed that the YouTube videos continue playing without interruption even when I switch to another tab or minimize chrome altogether and switch to another app.
how can we harness this power to play our favorite audio tracks in background (without any ads to boot ... shhh don't tell Google)
I also notice that the website triggers a browser warning when loading that it is not secure.
There are browsers extensions for this. I can't recommend one because I don't use this anymore. On Android this would mean using Firefox or another browser allowing extensions. Or you can give a YouTube address to MPV with the --no-video parameter. Or use NewPipe or one of its forks and open the YouTube kink with it in audio only mode. Or use invidious, but this last option is harder and harder to use. Or yt-dlp -x to download the audio of course.
There was an iOS app that used to let you do this; it would play music via Youtube embeds in a hidden web view, exposing its own UI for all the functionality you'd expect from a music streaming app.
Whether this was legal is... a gray area, it was a somewhat legitimate company that won some kind of Canadian startup contest on TV, but the music industry was, very predictably, furious at their business model.
Eventually, Apple got scared enough of being sued along with them that they caved in and removed the app, but that took far longer than I thought it would.
On Android you can use NewPipe for a similar experience. For obvious reasons it's not on Google's Play Store, but you can get it from F-Droid or Github.
I use Video Background Play Fix [1] (along with uBlock of course). "Firefox for Android can continue playing video even if you switch to another tab or app. However, sites can detect these user actions with the Page Visibility API and the Fullscreen API. This add-on is designed to block events and properties exposed by the APIs."
Many ways to do that on Android. NewPipe or its fork Tubular, Clipious, LibreTube, or host a local instance of Invidious or ViewTube and access them using the browser.
F-Droid and the ability to still run software outside of Google's walled garden is the last remaining reason preventing me from switching to iPhone. I've tried Yattee on iOS and it's okay on Apple TV but seriously doesn't come close to the power of Tubular on Android.
It would be very interesting to get a view of the source code for such a site. There are other interesting ideas that could be done by mixing videos selected using other filters etc.
I remember looking through the code awhile ago, it's nice and simple!
Uses socket.io w node.js + express, a crawler script searches YT periodically to keep the videos fresh. The server iterates randomly through the video list, telling all clients through socket.io which video is next, and when to switch.
It works if you use the default autoplay blocker setting ("block audio"). Probably you are using the setting "block audio and video" as default (I use that too) and in our case we have to whitelist it.
I can imagine that it gets boring really quickly to skim through random untitled YouTube uploads. Maybe back then when YT did have a weak filter and initially waved through the videos there could have been something worth finding.
Would be cool to see some statistics on how many videos over the years get removed with each new protection and censorship update. For example the latest medical disinformation campaign not only forces creators to avoid certain words completely, but also flagged and deleted pre-existing videos.
It’s sad and dangerous that any topic could get forbidden and erased not allowed to keep a history. The Internet Archive is unfortunately a target now and efforts are being taken to undermine it partly. It’s already a thing to have records deleted from the archive which should be the most worse thing when your whole concept is to archive.
I strongly suggest IA mirrors around the world in various countries with different legislations so that the censorship of each country is not reflected in the IA mirror of the other.
>It’s already a thing to have records deleted from the archive which should be the most worse thing when your whole concept is to archive.
IA doesn't delete archives, they merely make them inaccessible. Perhaps that's a distinction without a difference in the near-term, but it means things like copyrighted content will be republished after copyright expires.
> These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you).
At one point you might be at a school recital in Malaysia, and the next minute you are at a birthday in Ecuador. It's amazing!