YES. What the fuck piped? Work and I’ll use you.

Same experience, not from a lack of trying but I finally blocked the bot this week.

I had to really work with it to find a handful that actually showed video. Even then, they're hit and miss, sometimes requiring pings to remind them that I exist.

Then you get to the throttling...

I've never had any trouble playing videos with NewPipe + Sponsorblock on Android.

In a desktop browser it's trickier, but Libredirect helps immensely to redirect to a working instance on the occasion that one of them is down/doesn't play the video

I don't rely on any bots. I'd recommend unchecking "show bot accounts." I know some people find a few of them helpful, and I don't want to sound ungrateful to the people who've developed them, but they mostly just clutter up the threads in my experience

Worked fine for a month then nothing on every instances

I use Invidious now and it have a button to swich instances in case it buffering too long

Yeah, if you'll advertise a service like that, it should work already. Otherwise, odds are I (and other people too, probably) will click it two or three times, then give up. If I see future links, I'll remember that it didn't work, be biased to not even try anymore, and potentially never notice if it actually did improve and start working.

It's a common FOSS / Privacy-respecting-service issue, where someone will create something out of ideology, but the result will have poor usability, and unless you're really really invested into the ideology yourself, you'll probably stop using it because your free time is too precious to spend on getting frustrated over stuff that works poorly.

I feel the FOSS / Privacy Alternatives community needs to learn the lesson many bic companies have learned already or are learning now, that the quality of the User Experience is important in retaining people. Ideology can get them to try, but functionality and ease of use will keep them from running back to Google et al.

Huh, I wonder what the issue is. I e clicked on many of them and never had a problem with the video starting, though I suppose I’ve heard there were problems recently (as in perhaps YouTube has been hampering it).

I have issues sometimes, and others it works perfectly. I think they've got networks issues that need to be worked out.