Not just YouTube. Download everything. No exceptions.
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2026
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I have whole ass archives on my Plex. I try to update it once a year
I usually have to download YouTube videos just to watch them… YouTube doesn’t like my browser set-up or something and purposely makes things difficult
Is it a plugin or five? Does it work in In-Private or with plugins disabled?
It's silly how "the internet remembers" saying gets repeated. That was true pre-2010 roughly. These days it's evidently not that difficult for someone to be disappeared or disappear themselves from the internet.
Unless you're high profile enough or you've really angered a crowd. Nobody is going to be archiving you. Certainly nobody is dedicated enough to ensure that your content is perpetually hosted somewhere.
There are some Youtubers from the 2010 era who I used to watch. It's as if they never existed. They made their ad money and vanished.
It’s silly how “the internet remembers” saying gets repeated. That was true pre-2010 roughly. These days it’s evidently not that difficult for someone to be disappeared or disappear themselves from the internet.
Sayings like this are about threat modelling (worst-case scenarios). If you post something to the internet you need to assume that it will be preserved for eternity. If you want to preserve something on the internet, you need to assume that it will disappear.
my now deleted reddit account is archived on pullpush, just cause they scrape everything. I don't have stalkers, but i might in the future. They've just totally ignored my GDPR request and blocked me from communication lol. i've complained to my DPA but i think i either got ignored or i'm expected to wait over a year.
It only takes a couple of times to realize how quickly something you care about can be taken away and you'll never see/hear it again. Netflix brought on such convenience. I remember I watched Scrubs front to back multiple times, until one day I was told that it was leaving and suddenly I couldn't watch it anymore.
Youtubers and creators come and go, if there is something you care about it's on you to preserve it. No one else will.
I wish there was a legal way for me to create a "backup" version for others to watch like a PeerTube instance, but to creators they would see it as not fair to them, so unfortunately my collection remains private.
Remember the community D&D episode, then they pulled it forever because of the blackface joke with the dark elf face paint?
Is not even licensing, it’s just some exec had an opinion that maybe this is the least bit controversial or not in the current political zeitgeist.
Same with the Simpsons Michael Jackson episode, 30 Rock and It's Always Sunny also had black face jokes that ironically were meant to make the viewer feel extremely uncomfortable and realize how racist the character was being that are now gone.
Whether you agree with the jokes/premise or not, I believe we shouldn't pretend like none of that happened. To me that makes it worse. The fact that we feel so uncomfortable with it now proves that we are marching forward, and that doesn't mean we blindly hide from our mistakes. I like what WB did with Looney Tunes, they put a disclaimer warning that it was there, and that it was from it's time, and that to remove it would mean removing the evidence of how far we've come.
The original season of Stranger Things also had an episode that got retconned in part because of MeToo.
What was it?
I haven’t seen it since season one.
They tinkered with the pool scene where Charlie is photographing the party from the bushes, to my understanding.
I am still exploring PeerTube, as a user, but I am not sure, the UI of certain websites does not give me the confidence, maybe because I am developer and I am really picky with every detail but I am not sure. Maybe I am wrong.
Ao3 is still down :(
Yt-dlp is great! I used it it to download podcasts from Youtube so I could listen on my phone. Only later I discovered I can download straight through Pipepipe(youtube client). I actually even used it shortly for regular videos as well to watch them through VLC just so at the end of the day I wouldn't get hooked on youtube shorts and the rest of the nonsense on the front page.
Yt-dlp also works for most social media sites. X, Tiktok, etc...
Not sure about the value of downloading videos for the sake of storing them (after you've watched them) tho. I rarely rewatch videos.
If you really want to go deep, set up TubeArchivist. It's pretty neat. My offline library is about 30TB now.
Actually starting doing just that like 1 or 2 months ago.
I hope, really hope I can find a deal on two 8TB nas drives for my home server on black friday so I can finally bring it online after a yearof waiting for better perices...
I uploaded some music videos to odyssee, need to pick that up, I recently checked out my YouTube bookmarks and at least 1 third was not working anymore
Yep, I'm downloading my stuff as well.
It's funny that this post comes up in my feed, given I've been spending weeks customizing yt-dlp for my use case.
I've noticed favorite memes becoming harder to dig up. I've started archiving them lol
In particular, if it is a niche where you are a specialist, so you can judge the importance, and you know the general public does not know much about it. Those are most likely to become lost forever if your saved link fails you one day.
This sounds interesting.\ Is it a paid platform or how it works?
yt-dlp is a free and open source tool you run locally to download from YouTube (and others).
I often use it to download whole playlists or channels to then load into my Jellyfin server such as shows for my younger kids or to rip the audio for music.
You'll find most things posted here are not paid :)
Personally I use TubeArchivist
Interesting!! I will take a look, but are they safe? I mean I will not get any surprises later lol
Worst case YT blacklists your IP, usually temporarily. I've had it happen a few times, had to dial up my throttle avoidance settings.
I run mine behind a VPN just to be safe, and even then Google still tries to throttle/rate limit as much as they can - but it's important enough to me that it's still worth trying