YouTube deleted 16.7 million videos in six months.
Gone.
Channels you subscribed to.
Tutorials you bookmarked.
Music you saved for later.
Creators you supported for years.
Gone.
So one engineer named Simon, originally from Switzerland, now living in South East Asia, built a tool that ends this forever.
It is called TubeArchivist.
Nearly 8,000 stars on GitHub. GPL-3.0. Free.
It downloads any YouTube channel you subscribe to, stores every video on your own server, and gives you a Netflix-style library you fully own.
No ads.
No "this video is no longer available."
No algorithm.
No Premium subscription.
Then YouTube did the unthinkable.
July 18, 2024. They rolled out the "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot" wall.
October 29, 2024. They started IP-banning entire data centers. Hetzner gone. OVH gone.
Coincidence.
Here is the wildest part.
TubeArchivist did not fold.
March 28, 2026. Simon shipped v0.5.10. New release. Same one engineer. 17x more commits than anyone else on the repo.
It still works.
It still downloads.
It still restores the dislike count YouTube deleted in November 2021.
One Swiss engineer vs. a trillion-dollar ad machine.
YouTube Premium costs $13.99 a month. $167.88 a year. Forever.
TubeArchivist costs zero. Forever.
But DO NOT install it. We should all keep paying Google $168 a year to watch the videos we already chose to watch.
100% Open Source. (Link in the comments)
PICARD: Data, shields up
DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.
[camera shakes]
WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS
DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't
Left side is a human lung. Right side is a tree.
The tree breathes in what the lung breathes out. The lung breathes in what the tree breathes out.
God's design is incredible.