As one of the devs of the project, I will try to answer your questions as much as possible.
If you want to be Free Libre Open Source Software then use an OSI and FSF approved licence.
If you want to be FLOSS and protect your brand from people cloning your app, do like Mozilla and use a trademark + MPL.
If you don't want to be open source don't call it open source, it's shared source or something else.
I told him and he did not seem to consider it a big deal.
It's not shared source, since anyone is able to inspect the source code, not just a subset of people
Open source means OSI-approved licence and that will not change.
This is shared source or source-available, not open source.
And, obviously, thanks to your comments, the debate doesn't seem to be settled.
It's also not the only deceptive Adventisten. He also claimed that you can use it how you want the only use case they want prevent is injecting ads into their app. But that could be better solved with a trademark.
At first please define "open source".
1. Do you use this term as an alias for "The Open Source Definition" [0] as presented by the Open Source Initiative? In such case, the Grayjay project's license seems to not meet this definition.
2. Do you use it in a more general sense to mean any software whose source code is publicly available? In such case, the Grayjay project fully meets this definition.
[0] https://opensource.org/osd/
I would be very cautious to assume that the term "open source" must always and in all contexts be interpreted as having the meaning described by the definition 1.
Some people do not care about using pirated versions of Office.
Some people care very much about whether software is or isn't open source especially when it is claimed to be but isn't.
Being open source means that if FUTO goes bankrupt or is purchased or abandons GrayJay due to unprofitability or decides to pivot and become anti-user or etc. etc., then the app can be forked.
The current licences is so stupid that not only does it not allow forking, it actually does not allow using the app for it's intended purpose. This is egregious open-washing.
You subscribe to the creator, not the platform identity.
There are also very simple dedup algorithms to try and deduplicate your feed. However, they can probably still be improved.
like, the Youtube/Twitch feed be their main content with a camera directly on the creator with them superimposed on a screen recording, and the TikTok feed might be a different angle. But the comments and interactions are wildly different. The main purpose is to funnel towards either one, or yet another platform for payment, but this can be entertaining on its own to watch both.
does your app solve anything for that use case, or have any aspirations to? I think its useful to just be able to follow someone around, I have always contended that social graphs are easily exportable and the platform doesn't matter and I'd like to see social graphs as a first class citizen as opposed to being happenstance behind social media company's newfangled platforms.
If you are then subscribed to their YouTube channel, you will also see content they post on any other platform like Patreon, etc.
You subscribe to the creator, not the platform identity.
We cannot easily provide social graphs for platforms we cannot control. However, we also offer the option to make Polycentric comments where you as the commenter own your comment, rather than the platform owning the comment.
Polycentric is an open protocol https://docs.polycentric.io/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLoCtRzTkJQ&t=0s and you are free to create any social graph you might want to.
I hope this answers your question sufficiently.
Would it just stop working when WEI is implemented?
Perhaps in the future once we have a bit more time we can spend more time adding platforms.