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How are private front-ends built without APIs? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 5 months ago by governorkeagan to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm referring to projects like redlib or invidious.

I was thinking about doing something similar for a local second-hand marketplace and got curious. Redlib seems to use token spoofing to get past rate limits and Invidious doesn't even use the official YouTube API.

The only way I thought of, which would be slow, is to scrape the site (like you would with Beautiful Soup).

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[–] andreas@lemmy.kfed.org 2 points 5 months ago

RedLib and Invidious hoster here;

I can confirm they do not use any backend API, however this means eventually they (YouTube and Reddit) kick on automatic rate limiting after a while and I have to switch up my vpn connection on my server. it's annoying, but it works if you know a thing or two about proxies and web scraping (the knowledge from scraping can be cross applied to implementing a suitable proxy config)

that said, RedLib's backend token spoofing works a lot better than the Invidious method (Invidious emulates web traffic via Android mobile devices and gets the videos from Google Videos directly, bypassing YouTube for the heavy lifting).