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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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.
it looks like you just described the customer. apparently it isn't you. just because it isnt you and it isnt 90+ percent of people, doesn't mean it doesnt exist. there are all sorts of niche products for niche groups.
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 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.
As someone who tried to build a browser-based, serverless Youtube video downloader, every hack under the moon doesn't work. But doing it from a fully controlled client is easy.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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."
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.)
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.
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.
"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.
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!
331 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 312 ms ] threadGrayjay – Follow Creators Not Platforms - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37924776 - Oct 2023 (106 comments)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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)
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.
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.
Cuts down a ton of crap and shows you thumbnails and titles of things for what they really are.
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.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34109771
> 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.
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.
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.
Nit: the Linux release should use a compressed tarball, not .zip
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
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.
Grayjay looks like it may be a solution!
Between that and pirated shows/movies my kids are absolutely puzzled by commercials when we stay at a hotel or with family.
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?
It mentions using the Harbor identity service, that's new to me. https://harbor.social/
[1]: https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube
"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."
(It has to be subscription payment to deal in a scaleable and timely manner with sites changing their page schemas anticompetitively.)
[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.
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.