this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
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DeGoogle Yourself

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I'd like some feedback on a YouTube decentralization project I'm working on: Torrent-Tube (github.com)
submitted 1 day ago by dessalines@lemmy.ml to c/degoogle@lemmy.ml
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/49015971

YouTube is still one of the major points of centralization on the internet, so I've been brainstorming ways around the problem.

From the readme:

Torrent-Tube is a set of tools to help decentralize YouTube videos, by moving them to torrents, which can be shared by many people. It includes:

  • A Torrent-Tube search site which searches the Torrents-csv search engine to see if the given YouTube video already exists, and is being seeded.
    • It does this by extracting the YouTube [VIDEO_ID] from a link, which you can also do manually if you like (IE, the text after watch?v=...).
  • A script to download, and create torrent files from YouTube videos, with a uniform naming style and format, taken from TheFrenchGhosty's YouTube-DL-Scripts.
  • You will need to upload these torrent files yourself to a service (details below), and seed them.

Torrent-Tube Search

In the future, it may be possible to create a browser plugin that checks a video link that you're currently watching for existing torrents.

Create torrent script

Requirements

Instructions

Copy a YouTube video URL.

# Clone this repo
git clone https://github.com/dessalines/torrent-tube

# Run the script
./create_torrent.sh [YOUTUBE_URL]

The video will download, and is saved in the videos folder. The torrent file is saved in the torrents folder.

Add the torrent to your torrent app, such as qbittorrent.

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[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 7 points 11 hours ago

Why should I use this over yt-dlp, Piped, Invidious, etc?

None of those are attempts to decentralize youtube. Piped and invidious are only front ends for youtube, which can easily be blocked by youtube at any moment, which has happened in the case of tons of third party clients.

yt-dlp is a very useful tool (which this projects uses), to download youtube videos. It does not help collectively share them, as torrents would.

What does this do differently than the other projects?

Peertube and other youtube alternatives are based on centralized hosting. This is completely unsustainable, because the HD space required for servers quickly grows out of hand, and becomes extremely expensive. Meanwhile, torrents are shared hosting, where many people are sharing files at once. It is the main way large files like movies are distributed over the internet, for decades now. We should apply that same effort to creating torrents for youtube videos, in the same way that is already done for other large files.