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Grayjay Desktop App

grayjay.app

544 pointspierrelf305 comments

Launching the Linux release and noticed in the logs:

Directories:User Directory: /home/bisby/Grayjay

And there is a directory there now. I absolutely hate having stuff automatically create anything in my home directory like this. Ideally, this should be following XDG directory guidelines on linux: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/

Grayjay dev here. If you want it to use your user directory like other apps, just remove the file called "Portable". Keep in mind that it just uses your working directory to write files otherwise.

That's a windows-ism, we don't like that kind of stuff. Not on any other OS we don't.

Parent is not wrong, but definitely could have some improved manners and tact.

As a linux user I wanted to make sure to say thank you for supporting and thinking about linux!

Actually, parent is wrong. You're not supposed to do that shit on Windows either. That's what AppData is for. Writing configuration files and folders to "Documents" or the user's home folder is sloppy shit.

I agree that this should be in the XDG directory or AppData, but be kind, y'all -- this is open source, it is a gift someone has labored over and given you. There are much nicer ways to suggest improvements than calling it "sloppy shit".

edit: it's not actually open source by the OSI definition it seems [1], but it is reasonably close.

[1] https://futo.org/about/futo-statement-on-opensource/

Sure, things can always have gone better, but this is data loss/corruption territory. It's asking for trouble and hurt feelings. I think a strong response is ok.

What exactly is wrong with how they expressed themselves?

Is the word "hate" really so odious?

I was very blunt and impersonal. People worked hard on a thing and my first reaction was criticism, without even the added overall view of "I love this thing, but here is a small thing that bothers me." I could have been more courteous and human about things.

I stand by the points I made, but I could have been friendlier. I normally make an effort to be friendly as I can about things, but I absolutely did not here. I hope that nothing I said came across as vitriol, but rather, valid criticism. I'm a strong believer in criticizing the things you love, but I need to remember that random comments on HN aren't the place where people know I love the thing, and my criticism needs context.

So no, it wasn't really that odious, but it was other things. Do I feel stricken with guilt or remorse about what I said? No. Could I have been friendlier? yes. Should I have been friendlier? Probably.

I appreciate the reflection here.

>Parent is not wrong, but definitely could have some improved manners and tact.

I don't understand the weird tone policing that people are trying to do, there is literally nothing wrong with the parent's comment and pretending otherwise is weird.

I didn't see it as tone policing. From my point of view, I saw a very interesting application being shared and I hoped it would be good and prosperous so i can use it. When the first comment says "i hate that you do X" it is a bit discouraging towards a team of developers who have probably poured tons of free hours into making this. Words play with psychology, and it is my personal interest that these devs have good morale to make this app great, and that meand giving them feedback about obvious mistakes in a tone that does not hurt this morale. I hope that make sense

"i hate that you do x" is perfectly normal, you're being weird.

And that's not even the words used, they said:

> I absolutely hate <stuff that does X> like this

That's not even the words I used either.

> I absolutely hate having stuff automatically create anything in my home directory like this.

Which is

> I absolutely hate <action> like this

Which is not

> I absolutely hate <thing that does action> like this

I quite like grayjay. I just dislike this one thing it does.

Taking "I hate that you do x" as a combative or rude dismissal is perfectly normal too.

nah, you're weird.

Please read the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Comments like the one above do not belong here at all, it's childish, it brings absolutely 0 value to readers, and it's against the guidelines because it degrades the quality of HN for everyone.

I don't think it's badly worded either.

And FUTO is a commercial for-profit operation, not voluntary driven. Their devs are paid.

This is a cultural problem.

What is considered impolite in the US or the UK is considered just being straightforward in e.g. Scandinavia.

I am German, we're kind of in the middle between someone from e.g. Finland and someone from e.g. or the UK or US with what we consider "ok" or rather crossing into rude territory.

A common exchange I witnessed in a meeting at work (Nokia):

Finnish developer: And if we follow this suggestion we will all look like idiots.

UK developer: I hear you.

Deciding which one is more impolite or impolite at all is left as an exercise to the reader. ;)

You get my point.

It's not even impolite in the US, the people tone policing are being very weird. It's perfectly normal to say "I hate x behavior".

It's not normal to see someone doing x behavior, initiate a conversation with them and say "I hate x behavior." They're not tone policing you when they tell you that you come off like an asshole when you do that.

That's not at all what's happening here so it's irrelevant.

Dude, be civil, is givin me second hand shame

Even Windows has %appdata% which is where you put stuff on disk that you need to stash away. There's also function calls iirc which will give you a handle to a temporary file if you need it.

And if you’re feeling particularly Sadomasochistic there’s always the Windows Registry.

Hey, that's NSFW content on HN!

Also I still find it funny that OpenSSH client shipped via feature uses %HOMEDIR%\.ssh

You should be using `~/.local/share`, `~/.config`, and other standard directories on Unix systems. macOS has its own conventions.

You shouldn't even use those, at least hardcoded. Follow the XDG Base Directories spec: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/

Ah, right. Good point!

Is a Flatpak release planned? I am interested in Grayjay but don't really want to deal with a binary that lives outside of my distros package manager.

NixOS user here, where running precompiled binaries from your downloads folder won't work.

Could you look at supporting a Flatpak for Linux? If unsure, I'll happily throw a manifest together and post it on a MR.

nix-ld[1] and envfs[2] provide a decent workaround for unpatched binaries, in case you haven't heard of these tools yet.

[1] https://github.com/nix-community/nix-ld [2] https://github.com/Mic92/envfs

The blog post linked by [1] is quite good.

I use NixOS for the base system and Flatpak+Containers for everything else. I would rather keep it this way as it keeps everything nice and separated, and less chance of things breaking from Nix being rolling.

Grayjay dev here, we want to provide the app however people want to consume it (binaries, flatpak, appimage, ...) but it will take us some time to get everything as it should be.

thank you for the great work!

Sorry, to be clear, I dont wan't Grayjay data in my user directory AT ALL. Portable is basically what I want, I'm just very untactfully dropping feedback about where the data is placed.

Even with the "Portable" file, it creates a directory `/home/bisby/Grayjay`. I don't want that. No app should ever put a file or directory directly in `/home/bisby` without me asking it to. The Linux standard for "where should an app put it's files" is defined the XDG spec that I had previously linked (https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/).

The summary is that user specific data should live in $XDG_DATA_HOME and config should live in $XDG_CONFIG_HOME (and various other things like $XDG_CACHE_HOME). If these values are unset, there are predefined places to put the files (eg, data in $HOME/.local/share or config in $HOME/.config, cache in $HOME/.cache).

This puts all the Grayjay data in places like /home/bisby/.config/Grayjay (instead of /home/bisby/Grayjay) which is nested away inside a hidden directory and structured in a consistent way.

This would be the equivalent of putting data in %AppData% in windows instead of cluttering someone's "My Documents" (or whatever the modern equivalent of that is).

Some of the Linux decisions feel a bit like linux is a complete afterthought, but included because Linux users tend to agree with the FUTO philosophies. That is a reasonable thing given the Linux market share, and for "Build Version: 2" that I'm seeing the app info, I'm grateful that linux is included this early. This looks like it can probably replace freetube for me. However, it would go a long way if things are done to make sure they are done the "right way" on Linux (ie, on packaging and on directory specs).

Thanks for the work you've done on freeing up the web.

If you're launching it as "Portable", and you're launching it from your home directory, it's going to place the mutable data in the current directory. This is very standard for portable apps.

So no, "portable" is not what you want. If you launch it as non-portable and it drops a folder in ~, then that is a problem.

In both modes it creates a ~/Grayjay directory, even when launching from ~/tmp/grayjay/Grayjay.Desktop-linux-x64-v2/ so ~/Grayjay was inevitable. In portable mode it makes the directory and does nothing with it. In non-portable mode it dumps a ton of data into the directory. I didn't pay attention to what the data actually was. So yes you're probably right.

But either way, Portable mode isn't behaving portably because it's touching directories outside of the current directory, and non-portable mode is putting data in ~/Grayjay instead of ~/.config/Grayjay so it doesn't do what I want it to do in any mode.

I'm quite happy actually that while this is a HUGE annoyance... It's also only an annoyance, and VERY simple to fix (as long as they do). Which means that this app is likely going to wind up as a daily driver for me once a few things get ironed out. I see the concept and structure of the app, and I like it.

Grayjay dev here, empty dir is definitely not intended and has been written down on the issue list.

Typically portable apps place their data in the folder where the executable file is located, not the current dir.

Well, ideally I would like the OS solving this problem by simply chrooting/sandboxing apps to their own little worlds, with a proper API giving them optionally a way to the user's file system, similarly to android and iOS.

That is possible on Linux [0], but this kind of separation comes with its own can of worms. However, if your only worry is access to folders, Flatpak applications keep all of their data in a folder away from your home directory and use "portals" to access your system [1]. The security of the sandbox is debatable [2], but I would say if your biggest goal is containing non-malicious but badly behaving applications from messing with your system, then it's a very good solution, given you are comfortable with using Flathub (as most distributions won't build Flatpaks) and with the performance/integration impact this distribution method has.

[0]: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/basic-concepts.html

[1]: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/sandbox-permissions.html

[2]: https://flatkill.org/2020/

…and macOS. Sandboxed Mac apps get their own little home directory in `~/Library/Containers/`. To access anything else, they need to ask through system APIs.

Grayjay dev here, fixed for next release, thanks for the feedback all.

Thanks for the update, I look forward to the next release.

Please just adhere to the XDG-standards. Although my co-poster here didn't use the most diplomatic way of phrasing their grievance Grayjay is better off if it sticks to well established standards.

You would probably look weird at an software that installs itself in C:\MYAWESOMEAPPLICATION instead of using the Windows program folder like literally every other piece of software (except for legacy stuff like LTSpice). Creating visible directories in the home folder without asking is the Linux equivalent of doing just that.

Check if the XDG environment variables are set and store your stuff in these places — as it is now can be used as a last resort fallback. For reading config/data you do the same.

This. Hopefully the other post won't discourage them!

Though I do not mind folder create in $HOME at all, I second this recommendation.

I just glanced through that spec and find it agreeable..

I gave too many shits about my home dir once too..

My only correct way today is create your own home dir inside your home dir to combat this hell hole of never ending config junk in your home dir

It's a "green m&ms" thing. If the developers can't be bothered to adhere to something as basic as XDG, they're getting a ton of other things wrong, and my life is too short to spend on buggy slop.

It is not really. If you show hidden files there is a ton of junk folders above your non hidden folders. along with more junk like folders generated by the system. I can't be arsed to go look up ways to keep them from returning or manage when I can just have my stuff reside in my own organization. Windows user folder isn't better and Microsoft also adds tons of junk folders (3D Objects, Contacts, Links, Favorites, Searches, Saved Games)

> It is not really.

Yes, it is. It takes only a few minutes to comply with the XDG spec. If an author can't be bothered to do that, he probably hasn't bothered to make his program secure, stable, or extensible either. XDG non-adherence is a strong negative quality signal.

Unless they simply are unaware, or hold a different opinion.

Frankly, I expect when something needs to create data without prompting the user, that data ends up in $HOME. I know where to look, and bonus points for an easy to manage folder with that data in it.

Just because there is already junk doesn't mean there should be more.

You'd be interested in xdg-ninja: https://github.com/b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja

Like others said, fighting the clean HOME fight is just draining and futile in the end. This script helps you identify low hanging fruit, though, where you can change their storage location with a simple envvar.

I've used xdg-ninja. And it does feel futile. Which is why my original comment comes across a bit more as frustrated/exasperated bug report than an HN comment.

Right now everything that xdg-ninja finds are all things with a .prefix and hidden. which is whatever. if this was ~/.grayjay, I probably would have rolled my eyes but not even bothered to comment. I'm not a stickler about XDG, but I am a bit of a stickler about not cluttering my home directory.

I have my home directory mounted via NFS, which has worked marvellously since gigabit ethernet became cheap 20 years ago but lazy/ignorant developers are making it less pleasant every year.

Thank you. I thought I was alone in caring about XDG specification.

I love the right to repair work Louis Rossmann does, and this project goal as a whole, but this license is a major step backwards for software distribution with high assurances of security, freedom and privacy.

Debian, Arch, Guix, F-droid or any other independent signed reproducible build channels require a true Open Source license to function legally.

The license thus forces users to download unsigned non-reproducible binaries off grayjay servers and trust blindly that their build server is creating binaries from exactly the published code and not compromised to inject tracking or malware not in the public repo (an increasingly common attack they may not even know about for years!). Or say the grayjay domain is hijacked or even a BGP attack or a LAN MITM. All sorts of ways they could be helping distribute malware and not know it with no signatures or reproducible build proofs.

Thing is, your team would not have to solve these problems if you licensed it so the community could solve them for you, as we do for thousands of open source software projects.

I really want to see a project like this take off and would gladly donate, but only if it can be opened up for accountability via third party compilation and distribution channels so it can never be backdoored or co-opted for surveillance if your leadership or release engineers are ever compromised.

Said license: https://github.com/futo-org/Grayjay.Desktop?tab=License-1-ov...

There are other licenses like AGPL that would kill any attempt for someone to rip your code off to make their own proprietary offering, without locking yourself out of established freedom, security, and privacy preserving software distribution channels.

If anyone from the team is reading this, I would be happy to detail and discuss my concerns further as a software supply chain security specialist. Hit me up.

FUTO develops, for the most part, proprietary software that they plan to monetize. The license choice isn't some mistake that you can get them to recant by explaining the virtues of the AGPL and third party distributors. (They're already aware of these things; one of the products under their umbrella is Immich, which was relicensed to AGPL after they started employing the original developer, as a compromise between his goals and FUTO's.) They're deliberately going for the same model as Unreal: source access is only provided a courtesy to users, and/or as part of a marketing strategy, and they have zero interest in allowing you to fork their software.

while that is technically mostly correct, that does not properly reflect their intentions. they most certainly are interested in allowing you to fork their software as a user. but what they are also interested in is to prevent a fork to take revenue from the original developers.

so you can most likely (i don't know the details) fork and change and redistribute the code. what you can not do is exploit that commercially.

this goes in the directions of the discussions started by bruce perens that we need to rethink FOSS, because funded companies are taking advantage and making a profit from FOSS without paying the developers.

it is not obvious that FUTO's approach is the right one. it is an attempt at addressing the problem, and i expect that it will take more such experiments to shake out what the best approach to this problem really is.

That's not a fork in the sense normally used by the free software community. It's better than nothing, to be sure, and if Xerox had adopted this license back in 1980 maybe we wouldn't even be talking about free software today. But FUTO still maintains some control over what your fork can and cannot do, which violates freedom 1.

I don't have a strong opinion on whether this licensing approach is right or wrong, I just doubt "anyone from the team" would find lrvick's post a compelling argument for switching to a free software license considering their stated goals.

i was unaware that there was a free software definition of fork. for me fork is a technical term that is used to indicate that the forked codebase is going to be developed with a different goal than the original. which license the code has, and what the limitations of that license are, is not relevant for it to be a fork. i can make a fork of a closed source application if i have the code and the legal right to it (which i might have because i paid the owner for that right)

FUTO is not xerox. and i disagree that xerox is responsible for allowing free software to be developed. furthermore, the right to commercial exploitation is not what drove the idea of free software. commercial exploitation was necessary because otherwise selling tapes and other media with free software on them would not have been possible. today where distribution of software can be done pretty much without any cost at all, this right is no longer needed in just to be able to fork and distribute an application.

it is only needed if i want to be able to commercially exploit the changes i make to the application. this is where free software and these new source available licenses diverge. and this divergence is the entire point of these new licenses.

also historically there used to be an active community of the development of non-commercial software. many MUDs for example had a non-commercial license and each one of them was forked many times over.

> Immich, which was relicensed to AGPL after they started employing the original developer

To make a small correction, the AGPL relicensing happened _before_ joining FUTO, and was not a compromise.

(I'm part of the Immich team)

Sorry, that's right, it looks like the license change was a couple of months before. I must have misremembered something in Louis' announcement video.

I read the license and of course IANAL but it seems clear that Debian, Arch, Guix, F-droid or any other independent signed reproducible build channels can package and distribute their own reproducible builds of this software, as long as it is "free of charge for non-commercial purposes", isn't it?

(a FOSS license would also work, but if I have learned something in HN before, is that don't FOSS if you ever want to make money from something while preventing others from making money off of it)

You can take a copy of Debian and resell it or put it in a product and sell that. That’s a pretty important freedom of free software.

And Debian is OK with that, because Debian is not a for-profit company that paid it's developers money to make a product, thus they don't care that others get it and resell it.

For a company, the product itself, what makes money, cannot be OSS, as it makes its resell value effectively zero. If the software was OSS, then the software is _not_ the product, but added values are (support, consulting, etc... the classic trope)

But if the software itself wants to be the product, and is created by devs who require their monthly salary, typically the question is between a non-FOSS license or it not existing at all to begin with. Not between a non-FOSS and a FOSS license.

> For a company, the product itself, what makes money, cannot be OSS

It can. I work for XWiki SAS, and we sell some extensions under LGPL at store.xwiki.com. And it works, people and especially companies, choose convenience over installing the tools to compile and install the extensions themselves. It works because it's usual and easy to understand for companies to pay for software, and way easier to justify than donations to sponsor free software.

There are also several open source Android or iOS apps that you can buy. OSMAnd+, Conversations, DAVx⁵, Amaze Tools, Fair apps and are/were examples of this

Thanks for your perspective! It is interesting. How does the business plan deal with the chance that it's perfectly in my hands (read: on anyone with whatever motivation, usually commercial) to grab the code and provide the same thing but cheaper or even free?

In this case I feel that the answer might ultimately be that it works because it is mostly a niche market and there are other value adds such as support from the makers themselves, which is always a good thing but already is not the software itself per se.

I don't think many companies would be confortable with such a brittle grasp on their sales. Basically it relies on nobody else wanting to do the same (and maybe risk that they execute better).

Imagine if Photoshop was OSS... well, it is good food for thought.

(EDIT re. the apps you mention: also interesting cases; not sure how much that model is actively hurting them or otherwise helping them, would love to see writeups from the companies or creators)

> How does the business plan deal with the chance that it's perfectly in my hands (read: on anyone with whatever motivation, usually commercial) to grab the code and provide the same thing but cheaper or even free?

Here, it is just some extensions that are in a repository that is enabled by default in the main product (which is free and open source). Someone forking would not have their repository enabled by default. They could of course distribute their own version of XWiki itself with their repository enabled by default. The extensions we sell also come with some basic support, so there's also that. At some point, if someone forks and sells for cheaper, they'll also need to provide the fixes and the features asked by their customers, at which point they'll not be able to keep up with cheap prices.

I suspect a former colleague who now works as a freelance might be distributing some of these apps to their customers (they contribute some fixes from time to time through pull requests).

I guess if it happens more largely we'd figure something out. Now, it's also not our main income. You might be right that it's niche enough to fly under the radar. Forking and maintaining a cheaper copy might also not be lucrative enough: the apps we sell answer needs of existing customers anyway, so we need to write this code anyway, but someone external would probably find something more lucrative to do with their time. I don't know :-)

Another good example I didn't think about in my first comment is WordPress extensions with their premium plans. Because of the WordPress license, you are forced to distribute your WordPress extension as open source. And this is probably less niche, for the biggest extensions.

I was pointing out that Debian can't distribute software that is licensed "for non-commercial use only" because Debian doesn't have use restrictions, and so their users might be engaged in commercial use.

This is the point number one in their free software guideline,

https://www.debian.org/social_contract.html#guidelines

I think you don't understand what debian is or does.

> You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes.

>Notwithstanding the above, you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software related to payment to the Licensor in any copy you distribute to others.

>You may not alter, remove, or obscure any licensing, copyright, or other notices of the Licensor in the software. Any use of the Licensor’s trademarks is subject to applicable law.

To me that says that if FUTO decide to paywall the entire app, nobody is allowed to fork it to remove that.

As I understand it, GrayJay is not free (as in they want to be paid, which is I think is reasonable). How does this work with something like AGPL?

I'm curious to hear more, because I'm in the process of evaluating licenses for a software I'm planning to build and sell. For me it's important that users can feel safe with running my code and build it themselves - and keep using the software if I'm no longer around to maintain it. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

> as in they want to be paid, which is I think is reasonable

Considering the whole point of this app is to remove monetisation from YouTubers, I think this is completely unreasonable.

Well that's not actually the point. It's heavily focused on preventing deplatforming creators.

There is much more to monetization than AdSense, which is adblocked away very frequently already. If it wasn't already removed by YouTube for saying something pg-14 or falsely copywright striked.

There’s literally nothing in any open source software license that stops the author from getting paid.

It is literally one of the fundamental freedoms mentioned by Richard Stallman. Freedom to sell the software.

AGPL just closes the cloud service loop where someone can take your code, modify it and deploy it and offer it as a cloud service. As they’re not technically “distributing” the modifications they wouldn’t be required to release their changes by regular GPL but they would by AGPL.

IANAL

This comes up occasionally and while it’s 100% true FOSS doesn’t mean you can’t get paid, any sufficiently big project is going to get folks repackaging it without the payment component.

A good example is for-sale Wordpress plugins. There are entire sites/communities for using the FOSS license to take those for-sale plugins and redistributing them for free. The RedHat debacle is another example although with some more nuance. Standard Notes had a similar situation.

It looks like the FUTO license is trying to prevent someone from stripping the payment features and redistributing. Personally I prefer when folks use a FOSS license but I think the “you can get paid for FOSS” argument is overly optimistic.

As someone that runs a profitable FOSS business, you can indeed get paid well for FOSS. Just be better than the status quo by a lot. Thankfully it is a low bar.

Would you like to elaborate on how you run your FOSS buissness? What makes your approach different than the numerous company's that struggle with it

I took a look at your bio but after a glance (forgive me if I’m missing something obvious) it looks like you do consulting but I don’t see FOSS for sale. I’m curious what your project is if it’s something else, but if it’s consulting that makes sense. Consulting doesn’t really work for a lot of categories of software though. Like nobody is going to pay FUTO for consulting on following YouTubers.

We sell support, customization, ensuring packages some people care about most are supported, etc.

Also some people just pay monthly to ensure we stay viable because we save them a lot of work trying to implement and maintain what we do themselves.

Look at all the content creators that make a living on patreon etc. If you give stuff away for free people value but also make it really easy to support you, often people do.

An example outside my projects is Octoprint. Last time the founder had donations public, she was pulling in like 5k/mo for one person just doing FOSS dev for something totally free no one needs consulting for.

Our own projects individually are not that profitable as they are much more niche, so consulting makes much more sense for us.

That said, for projects that are fully open source you can get listed on opencollective so people can make tax deductible donations to specific open source projects, like the stagex project I founded: https://opencollective.com/stagex/donate

If you are going to do something for public good, make it easy for people to justify donating to you for a tax write off!

Interessting point with the tax right off. I asked my boss to donate to a open source software we used a lot in our dev department and he labeled it as license costs because donations aren't something he could argue for (big company tho).

Can’t you say this about virtually every single closed source binary only release software? Steam, 1Password, etc? Why is Grayjay special here. Just curious.

Correct. I do not use or recommend proprietary tools for any system a user needs to be able to trust. There are always alternatives.

The license lets you do whatever you want except rip off FUTO. What does the license prevent you from doing?

Everything I described in my comment.

> You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes.

Yes except all the existing reproducible build and independent signing channels are free software. They only do this software supply chain integrity work for free for those that provide their software for free. Also, the downstream distributions and compilations of software based on these channels, are using free software licenses, and someone -could- charge for say installing them on a new computer.

These communities should not be expected to change their entire license model to remove freedom 1, just because one proprietary software vendor has chosen to remove freedom 1.

So, fdroid, guix, arch, f-droid etc offering signed reproducible builds services for proprietary software vendors being off the table, it then becomes on FUTO to provide users an equally secure path to get their software with as good or better UX.

Right now the only way to assure you get a binary of FUTO without any malware in it is to compile it yourself. Expecting most users to do that is not a serious solution.

We could force their hand though under the terms of the license though.

Lets say I were to release a package of all the dependencies needed to compile FUTO, and on first launch it downloads the code on the fly, patches out any forced-payment or analytics, compiles it, then launches it. Their license would allow it, and it could now be distributed via free software channels technically. But users would just have a very slow first launch.

At that point FUTO loses, forcing us into hacky compliance and getting no money, vs releasing it AGPL in the first place and extending the goodwill that will make some want to donate.

Please remove "Also available on FDroid" from the page. This app is not available on F-Droid and isn't allowed to be added to it since it isn't open source.

Indeed, it is "Source First" license, dev(s) reasoning here: https://futo.org/about/futo-statement-on-opensource/

They make a very good case against corporate-friendly licences like MIT/BSD, which I definitely agree with, but say nothing about why they don't use AGPL. Honestly I think the problem with A/GPL is that they are considered "uncool". You just can't use them, because reasons.

Who decides what is cool? That's right, the marketing departments of huge corporations...

AGPL would still allow a third party to fork their code and create a commercial product out of it, which is what they are opposed to.

The AGPL only requires that the host also provides their code.

No, it also requires that it's licensed under the AGPL, meaning the users get free software.

Right yes, provide their code licensed under AGPL, it's an important distinction, thanks.

What it doesn't ban people from doing is selling a service, which is different from their license that allows only non-commercial uses.

I agree that is misleading. It has its own F-droid compatible repo so you can use an F-Droid client. When I hear "available on F-Droid" I assume it means its in the F-Droid repo.

where it says available on fdroid it links to their personal fdroid repository. plenty of projects both open source and not have their own fdroid repository. fdroid is both a repository that only allows open source software and a packaging infrastructure tool for people hosting their own repositories. based on the fact their claim that they are on fdroid literally hyperlinks to their fdroid repository i don't see how anyone could find that misleading. if anything it's fdroids fault for giving their own repository the same name as their infrastructure tool instead of doing what every other project did and give them separate names. for example docker and dockerhub, flatpak and flathub, etc.

here is a list of 100+ not official fdroid repositories. https://github.com/userkilled/FDroid-List-Repository

> if anything it's fdroids fault for giving their own repository the same name as their infrastructure tool instead of doing what every other project did and give them separate names. for example docker and dockerhub, flatpak and flathub, etc.

F-That

Yep, as a user I didn't find it confusing at all. F-Droid is designed for and around adding custom repos. FUTO links to their own repo and it all works fine.

I'd definitely consider this as being "available on F-Droid".

Should say "Available Via", that would further reinforce the status quo.

It is available in fdroid on my ungoogled phone. I don't know what you're talking about

https://search.f-droid.org/?q=grayjay&lang=en

> It looks like F-Droid does not have any apps matching your search string "grayjay"

You're using a third-party repo that allows proprietary apps. The real F-Droid only allows FOSS ones.

It should be written like "available as a f-droid repo"

Maybe F-Droid should just call their official blessed repo "F-Repo" to end the confusion, because this is clearly available through F-Droid, just not in the F-Droid official repo...

Being able to side-load a random unsigned binary via the fdroid app, or getting it from the F-Droid repository where they do independently signed (and ideally reproducible) builds, are very different things.

The F-droid team does not have a high bar to be dicks. They do it to ensure their users get binaries that match the published code to prevent increasingly supply chain attacks.

The standards are there for good reason, and if you do not understand those reasons, then use a license that allows the people that do understand to distribute your software for you.

Very very few software engineers understand supply chain attacks or how to prevent them.

For anyone who wants a lo-fi solution to subscribing to a youtube channel without having to deal with the youtube.com website, every channel has a built-in Atom feed that contains an entry for each video. My pipeline for watching subscribed channels is to just run a feed reader in one terminal (newsboat) and then copy-paste new videos from that into an adjacent terminal running a loop that runs `yt-dlp` on each pasted line.

You can find the feed URL by inspecting the HTML of the youtube.com/channel/.../videos page and searching for "rssUrl"; it'll look like `www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC...`

Downside: this feed will contain premieres, shorts and livestreams in addition to videos and AFAIK there's no way to filter those out. Depending on the channel, the title might make it obvious whether it's one of those.

You can use yt-dlp to get:

- the channel id by youtube channel url

- the duration + aspect ratio (<= 3 min + vertical = short)

- whether or not it's a live / future video

Yes, I do do that. I meant that there's no way to filter them out of the feed directly, eg via some URL query parameters.

https://youtube.com/@handle/videos

Handle is usually channel name without spaces, and is displayed under it on the website. So for Louis Rossmann that would be: https://youtube.com/@rossmanngroup/videos

Fyi, an automated alternative: https://github.com/jmbannon/ytdl-sub

This looks like a great way to allow the kids to watch a “locked down” Version of YouTube. I want a way to limit what my kids watch on there by locking them down to certain channels.

Yea, it's been working great for me. And you can even use SponsorBlock...

Setup was quite a bit of work though, so you need _some_ technical knowledge.

We always been missing good 3rd party search/trending for online videos.

I've been using a youtube frontend called pockettube, where I could make lists(channels) for content I like, without youtube forcing me what to watch.

Example. I have an Art and Food channels with my favorite content creators, I get to see the list in order of newest videos first, totally bypassing youtubes forced interface.

In fact, if people started creating front ends to youtube with real search/suggestion engines, you could find new content and help the less viewed but good content that gets bypassed.

Grayjay is great, since it uses multiple video providers, but you still have to "Know" who to follow. The search "Knowing" part is still word of mouth, random change of seeing a creators video, or the platforms showing it to you. Combine the 2, and it would be unstoppable.

I think if someone came up with a external database of content providers on multiple platforms that allows apps like grayjay/pockettube/etc to find new content, that is the missing piece.

Finding content is so hard.

All YouTube wants me to watch are "OMG YOU WOULDN'T BELIEVE WHAT THIS COP DID" content. I have no idea why they want me to watch those videos, I never do and I block the videos and the channels from recommendations but they keep coming ...

All I get are ads for weird suspect drugs and products, just going on these platforms is such a bad vibe.

YouTube has become especially horrific. It seems a couple years ago they gave up on video search- after 5 videos it will suddenly start recommending random videos under “you may like”. If I watch one UFC video I am flooded with recommendations of Joe Rogan, despite my subscriptions all being unrelated.

Best thing is, if I search for something it'll give me hundreds of search results. But if I then decide to filter by upload date, whooopsie! there are no search results, sorry!

You watch 2-3 videos on autopilot and Joe Rogan always pops up eventually. With that kind of promotion I dont understand why he's not bigger.

He’s pretty big. He helped tip a presidential election.

Considering his content is auto recommended to billions of people, should be bigger.

I don’t remember ever getting a Joe Rogan recommendation.

I have (recently).

I feel asleep to YouTube last night and woke up to a 4h Joe Rogan podcast playing.

Have you tried informing YouTube that you are not interested in Joe Rogan? There are several places and ways to do so in the application, and they seem to have worked for me.

No idea about who Joe Rogan is, maybe because I'm not American and because I use YouTube via NewPipe on Android, almost never inside a browser on my laptop and anyway never logged in with my account.

NewPipe doesn't need an account. I can subscribe to channels, bookmark videos and save them to playlists. It's all I need.

Not having an account has the disadvantage that I don't have a common list of videos across my devices. I could export and import but it's too inconvenient. I just share videos to the other device if I have to, via KDE Connect.

On your desktop please try Freetube. You can also import your NewPipe backup (history and subscriptions) Freetube will also allow you to have different profiles, that you could use one per device and regularly import their backups.

I do have Freetube but I forget to use it. I developed the instinct of reaching to my phone or to my tablet when I want to watch a video. The only source of videos on my desktop would be technical stuff embedded in pages from HN but videos are too long (as in time) compared to text so either I read the transcript if available or I skip to the next interesting post.

My experience is that YouTube recommendations are heavily weighted based on my watch history. If I watch a single video on, say, videogames, all of a sudden my recommendations are all gamer stuff.

Fortunately, you can easily edit your watch history. I just go through mine periodically and remove any kind of video that I don't want recommendations related to. Doing that has given me a very dialed in recommendation feed. If anything, it's too dialed in, and I rarely get serendipitous recommendations.

My YouTube recommendations are like 80% RC planes

> it's too dialed in, and I rarely get serendipitous recommendations

Youtube is doing better here for me in that respect than it used to. Once a week for the past month I get a button that asks if i want to see things it doesn't usually show me and I've even watched some of them. It's not perfect, but it does seem like they are trying.

It's biased by your watch history, but it's never just that. In my experience (browsing without accounts, in private browsing with no cookies, on rotating IPs), there seems to be a distinct spot in the algorithm for some inflammatory engagement bait regardless of your history. That bait is not dependent on your watch history and is based on your geographic location by the looks of it.

Regardless of what I watch, in the middle of otherwise on-topic recommendations, there will always be one or two videos that are attempts at getting me to engage with some complete off-topic inflammatory political bullshit. Of course, once you click on that, the "regular" recommendation system takes over and feeds you more of that (which is somewhat fine), but the fact that it's trying to suck the user into this in the first place despite no indications the he desires to be exposed to such content in the first place is disgusting.

There is strong incentive for youtube creators to create this kind of "clickbait" content (and especially clickbait titles and thumbnails) which perpetuates that situation regardless of whether the algorithm explicitly rewards it. As long as engagement is a factor and creators are rewarded for it then it seems like what you observed is kind of unavoidable.

I don't mean usual, on-topic clickbait consistent with the watch history. I mean that in the middle of said on-topic clickbait, one or two of the recommendation slots are always explicitly allocated to a broader, regional-level pool of inflammatory political clickbait completely unrelated to watch history.

So for example, I could be watching some niche technical videos, and my recommendations would be more of that for the most part. Except that on an English-speaking-country IP address, I'd also get some inflammatory Trump-related video among the usual recommendations. On a French IP I get the French equivalent, and so on.

So either consumers of various niche content (in unrelated fields, from retrocomputing to farming or vehicle repair) also all happen to be into political trash in various languages so much as to outcompete other on-topic videos in the recommendations, or the recommendation engine has an explicit feature to push inflammatory crap in addition to "organic" recommendations. I strongly suspect it's the latter.

My completely unsubstantiated pet hypothesis about this is that it's cheaper and easier to cache the same click bait for everyone instead of different well tailored recommendations.

Agreed.

The most insidious thing is when you see kids hooked on it. Not only are they fed the same garbage content and ads, some of it is actually harmful, like Elsagate. Some of those videos are still available on the site, and more get added all the time.

We can argue whether parents should let their kids use YouTube, and if the YouTube Kids app works well enough to protect them from this, but at the end of the day we're just data mines and not customers, so nothing besides public outrage and regulations could improve this. It's also an incredibly difficult problem given the amount of videos uploaded every day, but I'm sure Google could solve it if they had good reasons to.

> I block the videos and the channels from recommendations but they keep coming

Part of this is channels opening side or mirror channels that they upload their videos to as well (since you'll sometimes see the exact same video but no ContentID strike) so they can get around people doing that.

It's funny eh, the world's largest personal data collection company and they still have no idea what videos you want to watch lol

Their goal is not to show you videos you want to watch!

Select “not interested” for those videos. There’s also “don’t recommend this channel”. “Like” videos that you like. Your feed will quickly adjust.

Done that, no joy.

> Your feed will quickly adjust.

It does adjust in some way, but somehow it never picks up on the signal that actually made me like or dislike a video. It's very clear that some video-makers have figured out how to exploit this poor signal reception to shove really crappy content at people. Other video-makers, who aren't trying to dominate youtube revenue, are buried and difficult to find.

TikTok, meanwhile, takes about an hour of scrolling and reacting to cultivate a feed that is very tailored to my taste. It's truly remarkable. If the app gets banned it'll be a huge loss for finding people and content with similar interests.

(I also just don't have the desire to watch an entire 10-minute video packed with filler when I'm trying to relax unless it's very dense, and that's the entire revenue model of youtube. edit: I forgot youtube has shorts now)

While the YouTube algorithm could be better (e.g. its recency bias is much too strong), 99% of what it recommends me is in line with stuff I watched or liked before. So, I don’t know what to tell you.

Maybe your interests are shared by a lot of people who also like crappy stuff? Just joking, but there must be some reason for the difference in experience.

The problem is it never stops recommending stuff. So if I say to never show me some channel (because maybe it’s irrelevant to me), then it just fills that spot with the next slightly more irrelevant channel.

Pretty soon all the recommendations are way far off what I would ever watch, because of course i don’t want to watch everything YouTube has. There is a point where there is nothing left that I will ever wanted to watch.

How do I tell it to not show me any short clips with all caps font on them like it’s a news headline?

Watching hobby channels every now and then is very refreshing. I wish YT would recommend me more of those

A strong recommendation for the crafman, he's the Bob Ross of crafting.

For you. My recommendations are tech videos, documentaries and good music. I find YouTube to have a great recommendation engine. I do use ublock origin.

Look into DeArrow https://dearrow.ajay.app/

Cuts down a ton of crap and shows you thumbnails and titles of things for what they really are.

I've been using DeArrow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36273890 it calms down the thumbnail clickbait on YouTube, I feel like I enjoy YouTube more by watching less.

The Grayjay Android app (which I use regularly) has a "Recommended" tab under each video that provides anonymous recommendations based only on the video you're watching. I recall them asking me to opt-in to the creation of a database like this as well recently, but I don't think it's available yet.

Grayjay dev here, the idea is to have a plugin system for recommendation engines in the future. You can choose whichever recommendation engine you like and it will tell you what data will be sent to the recommendation engine in order to be able to make recommendations for you. There will likely also be recommendation plugins that run fully offline for people who care a lot about privacy.

Be interesting if someone makes a nice recommendation engine (search) that does trending of real videos by views/votes, not fake hand picked curated trending like yt.

Seems like people are finally annoyed at being controlled on what they are fed while they consume content. Thats what i like about grayjay, it embraced that freedom of the original internet, not letting corps control what you, putting the control back into the hands of the viewers.

I toyed with an idea for a patreon clone, that would allow users to post a thumbnail to their video, and underneath quick links to other hosting providers. So the main choice is upto the creator, but also allow users to choose a different content streamer. I always hated how these services controlled creators too. What stores they can use.

The idea of a "plugin" or provider, creators could pick their merch store provider even. Such ideas of opening a system to different companies, making competition.

Grayjay dev here. What you suggest you can already do in the Grayjay Android app. Support has not been added in the desktop app yet. Harbor is the app you can use to claim that you own a specific account and then you can configure for example which Merch to show. It supports the largest storefronts if you input an URL it will automatically scrape that specific page and cache the results. You can however also input a JSON.

Does this app has any creator monetization in mind, or does 'your way' means 'fuck you, i'm not paying you for shit, i'm just taking it'? None of it is "your content", or their content, it's just someone else's content they're leeching on. "full ownership" - of what?

literally just, what are their thoughts on that. do people deserve being paid? or don't? and if they don't and it's not worth paying for, how is it still worth watching? what is this bizarre mix of disdain and yet desire and entitlement to things, that they'll try to get them in whatever roundabout way, instead of just not watching the thing?

creators deserve to be paid. viewers deserve to not be psychologically manipulated by advertisements and algorithms.

insisting viewers "pay" by subjecting themselves to ads is an unethical business model; refusing to support the practice is a rational reaction.

"rational" as in, rationalizing the contradiction of "not paying" and "getting content anyway". just don't watch. don't support the practice entirely. it's not really as much of a stance as it is just a contrived way to excuse away getting the thing you simultaneously hate and crave. like, the content has already manipulated you even without you paying for it and refusing to pay for it, by making you do this little dance, of trying to get it and trying to rationalize getting it.

> a contrived way to excuse away getting the thing you simultaneously hate and crave

> just don't watch

Is your position a value judgement on the morality of not watching ads + technology that enables you to watch as few as possible? Or on the societal fixation to consume junk?

If the former, please elaborate on your position as it relates to VCRs and DVRs of the sort that are built-in to DirecTV receivers.

i just find the tension and contradictions of piracy kinda fascinating. "i hate this so much but i have to get it cause i apparently need it so badly". something being deserving to be obtained, yet not deserving to be paid for. and most of all, somebody feeling so entitled to it that they just can't actually refuse it completely.

You didn't answer the question, and overall you're being very mercurial in this thread. Write coherently.

> i just find the tension and contradictions of piracy kinda fascinating

You're calling watching a TV show without watching the commercials "piracy"? That's a very broad definition of "piracy" that I'd venture has almost no support outside of your comments here.

I'd call it piracy in a way. Ads are how that specific piece of content is made available - whether it be for paying file hosting costs, creator living expenses, video production, etc. Consuming media without providing compensation for it (through ad views in this case) would meet my definition of new-age piracy.

You want adblock developers to be caged by the state, like piracy site providers?

If anything, i'd say that your interpretations and subsequent tangents are incoherent. It's really very simple. Get better at understanding.

I implore you to

(a) point to a single tangent that is not a direct response to your remarks and

(b) explain how your decision to rant, apropos of nothing, against this video player app's creators is anything other than a bizarre non-sequitur

It's a yet another frontend that blocks ads (ads are a form of monetization), and so there's the question of 'do people deserve to be paid'. It's also talking about "taking ownership" over "your content" on its homepage, so there's the point about the content literally not being "yours".

No one is taking YouTube away from you. People make choices. There are many alternatives yet to explore. The network effect, the fact that many people, including me, are on the platform, is a benefit to the platform, more users more worth, yet no one is paying me to be there either.

Well its a two way street. Take it up with Google for not offering paid API access so people wouldn't have to rely on hacky web scraping solutions.

Creator support is probably the reason why Grayjay doesn't have SponsorBlock integration.

What it's trying to bypass is walls being put in place by Youtube after it established itself as a monopoly by leveraging technologies that worked and succeeded because of their no-walls philosophy.

Grayjay does have SponsorBlock

Good to know, I thought they wouldn't add it

I pay for Youtube premium to not have to see ads and potentially be manipulated by them.

Yet I still have to watch a lot of ads there, since for a large chunk of content creators, the economic model of Youtube doesn’t seem to work and they additionally include inline ads.

You'll probably like the Sponsorblock extension that automatically skips over the ad-read sections of the video.

https://sponsor.ajay.app/

There is way too much incoherence and righteous indignation in this comment for it to be the top thread here.

> "full ownership" - of what?

By a reasonable and charitable reading: full ownership over your legally-obtained copy of the material that folks (the creators/rightsholders themselves) are publishing for gratis online for anyone to watch, and likely some non-gratis stuff that you are paying these creators for if you are a subscriber and decide to enter your account details into the app.

This whole app looks to be a video player that works like an alternative frontend to the official players by e.g. YouTube, Twitch, and so on, in the vein of "unity of interface"[1] and a continuation of the spirit of the Miro player (see also: virtually every podcast app in existence).

You seem, bizarrely, to be responding to it like a new KaZaA or Popcorn Time or other torrent-backed something-or-other.

1. <https://www-archive.mozilla.org/unity-of-interface>

Grayjay allows you to view member (pay only) content if you log in with an account that has access. That allows creators to monetize their content.

I'm glad Grayjay includes an adblocker, I wouldn't use it otherwise.

So they're stripping away people's monetization just to insert themselves as a middleman for their own monetization? Very cool!

Oh cool, it's like RSS consumption for video content (I think). I worry that since it isn't using blessed APIs it would get shut down by the platforms if it gets much traction. Also "trust me instead of them" can be a tough sell to the privacy-focused crowd. I'd love something that makes it trivial effort for the creators to directly publish on more open platforms--more like RSS publishing for video content. But youtube gives you discovery and a cut in the ad revenue, so I'm not sure how to get the incentives to align...

You don’t need APIs if your app includes a web browser, though; you just need the patience to hook into the browser’s APIs, rather than the page’s, in order to backup content when viewed. User-operated Selenium is legitimately the biggest threat model to content islands. It’s too bad a third-party had to invent Grayjay as a standalone, rather than one of the browsers figuring this out and shipping it as subscription-payment functionality :/

(It has to be subscription payment to deal in a scaleable and timely manner with sites changing their page schemas anticompetitively.)

Thread last year https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37924776

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Grayjay – Follow Creators Not Platforms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37924776 - Oct 2023 (106 comments)

Linux version seems to work good. Was able to sync with my phone with no issues. My only complaint with either of them is YT Shorts support. I'll have to stick with Freetube for that I guess since there is a couple of creators that I follow that only release shorts

Having no Shorts would be a huge plus imho

yeah this is a feature not a bug lol

i think the problem with shorts is not their length but how youtube presents them.

freetube shows shorts in the same way it shows normal videos, just in a separate category. you have to look for them and click to see them and they don't push you to jump to the next one, and most importantly they are not random, just your subscribed channels.

some channels use them as intro/overview for their longer videos which i find useful. other channels use them for stupid stuff which i ignore.

you can ignore them completely if you want. freetube also has a category for livestreams, which i ignore to the point that i forget it's there.

grayjay could support shorts in the same way.

Exactly

Grayjay dev here, shorts will come, but on a tab you can turn off.

Can't wait!

YES! And thank you for a great app that is getting better.

I bought in right away too. Louis gave a rundown on the idea; namely, you can pay for it, or not pay for it, and in either case we are going to do our best to make it work for you, and maybe those you recommend it to.

Nice. Happy to support thinking like that.

Does freetube has macos arm app yet? I found emulated one unbearably slow.

Bug report (macOS): the app does not allow copy/paste, text selection, or even quitting thru Cmd-* shortcuts - it has no entries in the top menu bar whatsoever. There are also no context menus.

Grayjay dev here, noted. Thank you.

The site CSS is a little broken on iPhone, causing elements to hang off the screen or overlap. FAQ link gives a 404.

Technically, I think this is against YouTube (for example) TOS, though I don’t expect that would be enforced against end users.

It's broken on Android/Firefox, too.

This feels like a central hub for media you like?

I would assume these privacy claims would also include a ToS violation for the given platform?

And then of course the user has given Grayjay a lot of info so privacy?

Are they scraping the actual content too or just accessing it in some different way?

It doesn't use any API (at least the YouTube plugin). So they are (according to their lawyers) not bound to any TOS. All it does is open the page (like a browser) and grab it and only show stuff to the user that's "relevant".

You can check it yourself, while it is not "open-source" or "free" in the usual sense its source is available.

More details from Rossmann himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqTYg6vnQvw

edit: TOS not API

Grayjay may not be bound to TOS but users of Grayjay are still accessing YouTube services in a way YouTube would prefer they didn't. OTOH videos are available without having to log in or having an account at all so I don't know if there's any implicit agreement between someone accessing a URL and the service provider.

True. And they might close your account if you login.

How I display, download or request data without an account and which browser or app I use to do it is still my choice. I'd guess if they could do anything about it, they would have half a year ago. The only way would be to DRM/widevine all videos and apparently they aren't ready for that yet. If they block my IP I'll just get a new one.

I wouldn't even be thinking about using a 3rd party app or blocking the ads if their service was reasonable. No way I will endure that, if they block it I'll just watch something else.

I don't think that's a problem: you can browse to YouTube's home page and search for and watch videos without logging in. Grayjay is just another user agent, as if it was another web browser.

This looks really interesting. Specifically I would love to be able to set up something like this for my kids so that I have control over what they are able to watch on YouTube. I want to offer my kids whitelisted shows and creator accounts. I know theres a lot of interesting and high quality stuff out there but I do NOT want YT recommending things to my kids without going through me first.

Grayjay looks like it may be a solution!

I have NewPipe on my kid's tablets which is pretty good too, but it breaks more often. But it's great to have no ads + sponsorblock.

Between that and pirated shows/movies my kids are absolutely puzzled by commercials when we stay at a hotel or with family.

This is the most maddening thing about all content now. It's all platform based and every platform wants to constantly push/"recommend" things to you and your kids. Right now I use Roku and Plex but even both of those are constantly trying to break down the wall.

Grayjay dev here, this is for sure a use case we have in mind. The idea is in the future to allow you to share subscription groups you've made for your kids with friends.

Maybe there can be a website where people share subscription groups with each other in general. Good archery channels, good fitness channel, kid safe channels, etc.

Another thing I am pondering is if it is worth adding a mode that prevents your kids from accessing other content then what is in a specific subscription group.

Thanks for the reply, I will give Grayjay a shot.

I think just letting the primary account specify creators/channels and then have a sub accounts with no ability to modify would be sufficient.

Im sure there are already all sorts of recommendation groups or sites, maybe just provide links to quality ones?

Weird that it disables the use of right click, paste and seemingly your password manager when trying to login to services via the app.

Grayjay dev here, good point, will add right click, paste.

Why wasn't it supported all along? Doesn't basically every text field support it by default?

> Our Apple signing/notarization is not entirely done yet, thus you have to run the following command once to run the application

This is unclear to me, what does “not entirely done” mean in this context? Has the process been started and they are waiting for Apple?

The screenshot in the “Add and configure sources” section has the YouTube plugin with the caption: “One of the biggest video platforms owned by Google”.

The stupid thing is that it’s entirely believable that Google would have multiple competing video platforms. Certainly they tend to have half a dozen competing chat things alive at any give point in time, two or three with the same name for bonus confusion.

(The sentence could do with a comma: “One of the biggest video platforms, owned by Google”.)

Trying this since YouTube just started blocking my ad blocker. It seems to be working well on Linux.

I didn't find a feedback button on the app itself, so if the authors are reading, some things I miss from using YouTube's website:

- Videos in new tabs; - Search bar always visible.

I also noticed that Youtube prevents me from watching videos on their site starting today because I have an adblocker (uBlockOrigin) installed.

Same here. But for the time being, I can just click away the modal (don't click any of the buttons) and the video starts anyway. I assume that will change soon.

Request: When I use NewPipe, I can drop a YT URL into the search bar, which then treats it just like an address, more or less immediately playing the video

This would be nice to see in GreyJay.

Edit: Oh never mind! I just took the update, and it is in the can now!

You guys rock. Thank you.

I've unzipped Grayjay for Windows into a folder and is ready for use, and am trying to set up the "grayjay://" URI so that it opens Grayjay when a link is clicked on.

Namely, trying to add plugins to my Grayjay install via https://plugins.grayjay.app/, but my browser doesn't know how to handle links that have the "grayjay://" URI as a prefix.

Any help with this is welcomed. I'm also hoping that future releases will either be distributed as an executable installer that automagically takes care of this, or with a patch that can be applied to allow for true "OOTB" functionality without having to tweak/meddle with Windows settings/registry.

EDIT 1: Running Win 10

EDIT 2: Found a way within Grayjay to install plugins, but would like to still have this URI set up for future use.

I love the dictation (STT) app from the same (FUTO) creator. It has completely replaced any other dictation solutions on my phone & it is fully offline!

FYI: I accidentally logged into my wrong patreon account and expected "logout then login" to prompt me to login again. It doesn't. It just logs me back in with the same user.

Grayjay dev here, that's a bug, I wrote it down. You can probably work around it for now by logging out -> restart app -> log back in.

Recommending (and running) `xattr -c` can be extremely dangerous. I would suggest withholding Mac releases until they can be distributed/run safely.

As someone not very familiar, is there any legitimate reason why they say "Our Apple signing/notarization is not entirely done yet"?

It feels extremely suspicious, given that I download lots of other popular utility software from independent devs and I've never had to do that before.

As a platform that basically started as a way to watch Youtube without tracking and ads, I think Grayjay should be sceptical of any third party code signing validation requirements. The copyright lobby has gone after software and its distributors before, even if it doesn't inherently pirate any content without user configuration.

I don't know why this app would need Apple's signature in the first place, seeing as it's not distributed through the app store. Is this like how you need to pay for a certificate to make the "are you sure you want to run this" prompt look less scary?

There are certainly valid, conflicting opinions around signing/notarization requirements for software. But notarization does provide end users with some safety guarantees that legitimately make running the software less risky. The scariness of "are you sure you want to run this" prompts is fairly grounded in real risk assumed by the end user.

There are a couple of legitimate reasons, namely the expense/KYC process of an Apple Developer Program membership and/or the complexity of integrating signing + notarization into existing build pipelines (but XCode does makes it pretty straightforward to cut an ad-hoc release that is signed and notarized).

In my opinion at least, the most likely reason is that Apple is refusing to notarize the software. If this is the case, people really should not be running it.

Once you buy a Mac, Apple doesn't own it anymore, so them not wanting you to run a piece of software isn't a good reason why you shouldn't.

This used to be true. It is, in fact, not true anymore!

It's still true. Why do you think it isn't?

Apple refusing to notarize it actually makes me want to use it more. That means Rossmann and his associates have got under Apple's skin enough that they would try to sabotage projects that he is involved with.

Not everyone wants to pay $99/year to be able to notarize software that is not going to make them any money.

https://github.com/disable-gatekeeper/disable-gatekeeper.git...

That doesn't map to safety or danger at all. It's purely a way of opting out of the developer having to pay the Apple tax.

Do you also suggest never releasing any software for Linux because there is no megacorporation there policing what software you should and shouldn't run?

It's about as dangerous as running a Linux or Windows binary.

The best feature of alternative YT clients IMO is "multiple subscription lists". I have so many subscriptions, when using the official YouTube app or site the "subscriptions" feed is overwhelming, and I prefer not to use the algorithmically-generated "home" feed. Since YT has kind of become the de facto "place to upload videos on the Internet", video topics are broad enough to constitute multiple web sites, and I like to be able to filter channels by topic rather than having them all grouped together.

If you're opposed to using a separate app just for this, you can achieve something similar using an RSS reader and YT's official RSS feeds (which I'm surprised they still publish tbh).

Great point. There are many yt channels that I would subscribe to if yt had multiple subscription lists. Channels I find interesting, but not enough so that I want them to "clog up" my main subscription channel.

Reddit had the same issue not too long ago. I remember a popular post where a user described their workaround of creating an account for each field of interest. To Reddit's credit, they did implement custom feeds not to long after, which lets you group batches of subreddits. Not something I'd expect YouTube to do.

I can still save multireddits. Did they remove that on new.reddit.com ? Try https://old.reddit.com/r/multihub/

Did you know that YouTube used to have this exact feature? It was called subscription collections and they publicly promised that they would replace that feature with something better when they removed it. That never happened. It's been 9 maybe 10 years since they said that. [1]

The removal of that feature was an intentional push to take away user agency and push them into using YouTube's recommendation algorithm. The lying was a way to misdirect user complaints until it was too late.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38101629#38104494

Never trust the platform. User sovereignty or bust.

Yup. I really liked that feature, but hey who cares about user preferences. the only thing that matter is engagement metrics. it's not like there's any real competition to YouTube you can run to. and the hunt for ad-blockers is getting fiercer.

my workaround to getting different topics separated have been to have multiple YouTube channels inside a single account, each with separate likes/sub channels/recommendations etc. one per Firefox container.

freetube has multiple subscription lists. they call it profiles. any channel can be in multiple profiles of your choice.

Shh.

Seems like a verry brittle setup. Since it adds adblock by default all this will do is make youtube crack down on adblock even more.

It feels like there is a trend of apps out there that are "about" creators, but then happily shaft them ...

I thought so too when I started using the android version. I was surprised when GrayJay's Youtube plugin was promptly updated the same day Youtube broke it. NewPipe needed a few days to work again.

Can someone explain what this is? The page has almost no information (on mobile) and I don't want to install just to find out.

"Grayjay combines video content from multiple platforms, such as YouTube, PeerTube, Twitch, and others, into one app, removing the need to switch between different platforms."

Aside from vaguely implying it’s some kind of media player that plays content from the internet, that doesn’t tell a whole lot.

Some screenshots would be a nice addition to their page.

Screenshots disappear for some reason on mobile. Home page has screenshots but only of the mobile app.

There are a bunch of screenshots on the linked page, you might have a plugin that is interfering with the content if you don't see them.

Grayjay is a video player for YouTube and other services. I believe its ad-free and "algorithm-free", meaning it just gives you every video from every channel you subscribe to, in chronological order. It was initially for Android and iOS.

It's backed by Louis Rossmann, who does a lot of right to repair advocacy, among other things.

I don't get the motivation. You want to prevent doom-scrolling? I don't doom-scroll on Spotify, why is that there?

I think the point is to follow a creator. So if you like an artist, you'd follow them and get their Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, Twitch, etc. all in one place.

I'm interested in trying this out and started to go through the login flow for youtube, for some reason it opens in a tab within the Grayjay app which then means I can't use Google's passkey auth, and something is even preventing me from copy/pasting my Google password in from my password manager (it's too long for me to want to type out just to try the app.)

Gentle feedback to open the auth flow in the default browser, might make things easier.

The modern day “Trillian” for video/musiv

The Trillian I knew was a jabber client

Jabber and AIM and ICQ and MSN messenger...

FYI, the FAQ link in the footer (https://grayjay.app/faq) appears to be broken (throws a 404)

I’m getting a 404 error for the FAQ link in the footer. It seems like this is similar to FreeTube [1] (which is YouTube only though, whereas Grayjay supports multiple platforms). Does Grayjay allow downloading videos (and if yes, does it also allow choosing the quality/format)?

[1]: https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube

Yes, you can download on both the mobile app and the desktop program.

Of course it's an Electron app that unzips to about half a gigabyte for the Linux version thanks to having to bundle a whole Chrome browser runtime. Totally insane for a streaming video application. If only there was a Qt version, that respects keyboard and mouse focused desktop UI conventions.

Seems similar to the updated Reeder app for mac/iOS. Its an RSS reeder that now works with Youtube channels, Reddit subreddits, Bluesky, Flickr, etc. https://reeder.app/

Looks interesting, does it allow for offline caching or archiving of media?

It mentions using the Harbor identity service, that's new to me. https://harbor.social/

the FAQ page on the grayjay site is broken/404ing: https://grayjay.app/faq

Last thing I want is even more ways to distract myself. I want an anti-algorithm or something to permanently ban me from addictive content.

Would be great if we could change the playback speed to more than 2.25, as I'm normally between 2.5x and 3.5x.

Instead of having to visit several drug dealers, this will aggregate all my favorite drugs into one convenient place. Fantastic!

This seems cool. Will test on Mac later today. Would like an iOS app

I’m excited. Are we ever going to see an iOS version?

The App Store forbids any app that violates the terms of service of any company [1], regardless of the legality [2]. Since YouTube forbids alternative clients in their terms of service, Apple will not allow Grayjay onto the App Store. Even in the EU, where multiple app stores are available, you still need to follow a subset of the App Store guidelines. I looked through them and it appears that the ToS violation guideline is in fact exempt for EU apps [1], so they could release a version in the EU exclusively. However, they may be subject to the Core Technology Fee.

[1] 5.2.2, 5.2.3: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#int...

[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/federal-judge-rules-it...

There is some precedent for Apple allowing apps that can be used for ToS or even copyright infringement, as long as they have a plausible legal purpose and all the infringement happens through third-party plugins that are not advertised in the app. The example I'm most familiar with is Paperback. There's also precedent for Apple not caring about Google's terms in particular, e.g. with Musi, though I guess that did get taken down in the end.

Grayjay also uses a plugin model, possibly for this exact reason. On the other hand, the infringing plugins are first-party and advertised via their website, so I somewhat doubt that either Google or Apple would allow it on their stores.

What about Tiktok? Add that and i'm interested

Lol. Don’t hold your breath. I used to enjoy TikTok until they forced me to create an account and install their spyware.

What spyware? I don't have a tiktok account

Because TikTok is a Chinese company most people just consider the app to by spyware. It's probably not any more spyware than other similar apps, but being owned by China makes it a little more worrisome to some people.

I don’t care where they come from. Why do they force you to signup to see a video that can be played using standard web technology?

Take a look at the following blog post that looks at TikTok’s encrypted VM and how it profiles you. And this is just on the website, without even installing the app.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34109771

Yep. My point exactly!

And you can’t use TikTok without an account because they need that to “spy” on you.

Grayjay dev here, TikTok plugin pretty much works already, we just need to add the respective UI for both mobile and desktop to make it work nicely.

This looks cool. Sort of a FreeTube with plugins?

Content overflows viewport in iPhone SE

How is this different from Jellyfin?

will grayjay do the push/creation side as well, or is that a different product?

Works well so far! Good work!

Nit: the Linux release should use a compressed tarball, not .zip

What is the functional difference? unzip is installed as a default on linux distros just as tar is...

God those content screenshots contain so much reactionary BS.

I’d like to believe it but I’m so jaded at this point. Give you, one vendor, all my data from these different platforms to ‘protect my privacy’, that I only have at this point because my behavior is dispersed across platforms. Hmmm.

I don't have a FUTO, Grayjay, or Youtube account and use the app just fine

You're right to be sceptical, they still have their proprietary license that basically forbids forking.

Grayjay dev here, forking is not forbidden.

So the license has been changed from the previous futo one, but there's still heavy restrictions on what anyone can do with it:

> You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes.

>Notwithstanding the above, you may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software related to payment to the Licensor in any copy you distribute to others.

>You may not alter, remove, or obscure any licensing, copyright, or other notices of the Licensor in the software. Any use of the Licensor’s trademarks is subject to applicable law.

To me that says that if FUTO decide to paywall the entire app, nobody is allowed to fork it to remove that.

Grayjay dev here, you are not giving us any data. You can review the source code, the only data being sent to us is a single data on bootup to let us know how many users we have.

I believe you.

I’m coming from the perspective that lots of great intentioned ppl who want to buck a social norm, run up against obstacles and the have to start compromising, eventually reverting back to the norm. A founder has to make an unsavory deal with an investor, or they get fired, or they cash out…

Jim Jones started out as an idealist. Putin was super popular early on.

Generally I put my faith in systems, and consider human nature as more of a constant, dependent more on situation than individual over the long term.

The license we use allows forking and distributing just not commercially.

Okay?

Your pitch mentions ‘privacy centered design’. Yet what you add to my world from a privacy perspective is a new custodian of my data on par with my telecom provider (highly regulated for me in California) or my Apple Browser. Apple I currently trust, because they continue to show signs of being good stewards, and they make enough money elsewhere to continue to afford the moral high ground. You guys, I need to trust that 1) you permit no 3rd party managed plugins in the client, 2) you won’t inject analytics software of your own.

I’m not managing the version of the client I download from your site, you guys do that.

EDIT: We are transitioning to a world where Govt jobs are currently being handed out by party affiliation, right now Charlie Kirk is vetting candidates for DOGE based on loyalty. There is nothing to stop companies doing the same, and I assume many of them do, with a simple review of a person’s social media activity before hiring.

This next political cycle is going to be dominated by data weaponization at a personal level IMO.

"Source First License 1.1" is an interesting choice. Sounds like something specific to this developer (so far, at least). I'm not savvy enough to be sure, but it doesn't sound compatible with any of the commonly accepted-as-FOSS licenses.

https://github.com/futo-org/Grayjay.Desktop/blob/373cd8448cb...

> it doesn't sound compatible with any of the commonly accepted-as-FOSS licenses.

Correct, it violates the four essential freedoms by placing restrictions on commercial use amongst other things.

It's closer to source available than proprietary

Huh, weird license: https://github.com/futo-org/Grayjay.Desktop/blob/master/LICE... Not sure what this means, guess I'll have to treat it as good old "source available" software.

NixOS packaging request if anybody would like to contribute: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/366543

What is this app? Avast blocks the site as malware. False positive?

"This URL contains malicious code that could harm your computer. If you’re willing to risk it, you can turn off your Avast Web Shield to continue. But we strongly recommend walking away from this one."

Somewhat ironic trusting malware to tell you what's malware and what's not

Definitely a false positive

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