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/
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
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.
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.
Could you look at supporting a Flatpak for Linux? If unsure, I'll happily throw a manifest together and post it on a MR.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Considering the whole point of this app is to remove monetisation from YouTubers, I think this is completely unreasonable.
To make a small correction, the AGPL relicensing happened _before_ joining FUTO, and was not a compromise.
(I'm part of the Immich team)
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.
(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)
>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.
here is a list of 100+ not official fdroid repositories. https://github.com/userkilled/FDroid-List-Repository
F-That
I'd definitely consider this as being "available on F-Droid".
Who decides what is cool? That's right, the marketing departments of huge corporations...
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.
> 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.
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.
- the channel id by youtube channel url
- the duration + aspect ratio (<= 3 min + vertical = short)
- whether or not it's a live / future video
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cuts down a ton of crap and shows you thumbnails and titles of things for what they really are.
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?
> "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.
insisting viewers "pay" by subjecting themselves to ads is an unethical business model; refusing to support the practice is a rational reaction.
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.
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.
I'm glad Grayjay includes an adblocker, I wouldn't use it otherwise.
(It has to be subscription payment to deal in a scaleable and timely manner with sites changing their page schemas anticompetitively.)
Grayjay – Follow Creators Not Platforms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37924776 - Oct 2023 (106 comments)
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.
Technically, I think this is against YouTube (for example) TOS, though I don’t expect that would be enforced against end users.
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?
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 looks like it may be a solution!
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.
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?
Between that and pirated shows/movies my kids are absolutely puzzled by commercials when we stay at a hotel or with family.
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 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”.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
https://github.com/disable-gatekeeper/disable-gatekeeper.git...
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.
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).
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.
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.
It's backed by Louis Rossmann, who does a lot of right to repair advocacy, among other things.
Some screenshots would be a nice addition to their page.
Gentle feedback to open the auth flow in the default browser, might make things easier.
It mentions using the Harbor identity service, that's new to me. https://harbor.social/
[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...
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.
Nit: the Linux release should use a compressed tarball, not .zip
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.
https://github.com/futo-org/Grayjay.Desktop/blob/373cd8448cb...
Correct, it violates the four essential freedoms by placing restrictions on commercial use amongst other things.
"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."
