Should be fixed, I pushed a fix yesterday! :)
Would you like to add feddit.rocks? It’s a lemmy instance run by me :)
Unfortunately, yes since for views to be counted, we have to make some tracking requests to YouTube.
Piped uses the Odysee sync API to find YouTube content already available there, and if so stream it from there. This is also written in the readme on the GitHub :)
It should be back now! I’ve migrated it to a new server earlier today since the old one had some issues.