Instance health meters

[damascene]

Some instances goes down or get overloaded. I think it would be a better experience if this plugin could ping servers from time to time to check their health status.

You can also use lists like this: https://instances.invidio.us/

[hjek]

Some instances goes down or get overloaded.

... and some are rate-limited or blocked.

This is a big issue and for some sites it happens often. Say I've opened a Youtube link in a new tab and it's redirected to a non-working Invidious instance, what am I supposed to do then? Currently the solution seems to be to manually edit the URL in the address bar back to Youtube in order to get Privacy Redirect to select another Invidious instance. That is terrible UX and that is what's keeping me from recommending this add-on to non-techie friends.

Instance health meters

I'm not sure instance health meters would be the best approach to this issue. It would require a lot of pinging and complicate the UI.

At a minimum there should be a Try another instance-button to save you when you land at one that's not working (Easy to implement). Even better would be if Privacy Redirect could automatically do this, perhaps by checking HTTP status codes, like the Wayback Machine add-on does.

[moriel5]

Pinging sounds like a good idea, especially in combination with a public health list, since then it would not rely solely on what is considered healthy, but go through the "healthy"list, and check what is best for the specific user.

[moriel5]

@hjek By the way, the official WayBack extension had become extremely unreliable lately, especially on Firefox (where it hasn't been updated for over a year), trying to redirect even when the page is perfectly fine, so I have moved to an extension called Archives, that also supports additional sources such as Google Archive, Yahoo Archive,and Baidu Archive, amongst others.

And yes, people have posted an issue about this there, which has been completely ignored.

[SimonBrazell]

I would certainly consider including this feature if someone was to submit a PR.

[farooqkz]

Hello. I have this plan for invidious instances only:

• Exclude dead/unhealthy instances from the list[1] or those returning 4xx or 5xx
• Sort the list based on browser ping[2]
• Select the one with the best ping

I can do it for 20 dollars in cryptocurrency.

[1]: I'm not using the API in the first post. [2]: The ping won't be much accurate comparing to the ping you take from command line using ping networking utility.