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/

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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

> 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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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!

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”.)

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.

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

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).

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.

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

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

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/

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

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.

The modern day “Trillian” for video/musiv

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

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

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

How is this different from Jellyfin?

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.

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?

What about Tiktok? Add that and i'm interested

Content overflows viewport in iPhone SE

This looks cool. Sort of a FreeTube with plugins?

Works well so far! Good work!

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

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.

"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...

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."

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