Watched Louis Rossman today, and he’s part of the team behind a new app for watching online video content - not just youtube, but nebula, peertube, twitch and more.
adblock already integrated, works amazingly with a quick test on my end - it’s an app in the Lemmy spirit
(it’s got a paid model similar to winrar, you don’t have to pay - but they do want you to - opensource and all)
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It’s not enough to make work around for YouTube. We need a new YouTube.
He talked about saving videos from being deleted when you lose one of your accounts, so it’s in the works
True, but with the ability to combine all competitors in a single feed a significant hurdle has been removed
This is why I’m excited for it. Alternatives simply do not have the breadth nor depth of videos YouTube does, but if the same content is found on either platform, you bet I’ll pick an alternative. It’s an onramp to other services.
What’s Piped?
Piped is alternative frontend, so still youtube
That’s basically what it is
that’s literally the whole point of this?
the point of this is a new youtube is unlikely to take off because people can’t start using it without missing all their regular content.
this means you can keep all your regular content and add new sources, with the same creators, which means they can start to move to new platforms and take their followers. that’s how we’ll replace youtube.
https://xkcd.com/927/
There are several "new YouTube"s. The problem is getting people to transition to them. And this is intended to do exactly that.
It needs YouTube to fall first, no one has that kind of money to operate at such a loss for such a long time.
Platforms with a serious offering have no chance until that.
I downloaded this app yesterday and I love it.
Tried it out a bit. I Ike the idea of the app being basically an rss read for video platforms. This is great for not having a bunch of apps (twitch app/Xtra for twitch and YT app/Newpipe/skytube/etc. for YT.) A user profile and allowing app comments are nice to have on the app.
However, I’m worried about what Rossmann says in regards to profit and maintenance. The app is moderated/worked-on by (I think paid) professionals and we should pay a license of $9.99 yet the app is also unprofitable and may never turn a profit. So, what’s the point in paying for the app?
Rossmann has a millionaire backing up his repair business among other things. So, is some of this being funded by that person and other investors of FUTO or is our money the only thing keeping this afloat? How are these workers getting paid if it’s a one time payment and the money is uncertain? How is the platform going to stay up and pay fair wages? The app is niche and I can’t see too many people paying for a license. I also can’t see too many workers staying unless they are passionate. Something isn’t adding up unless I’m wrong.
By paying for the app, you’re merely donating to FUTO. As Rossmann mentioned in his video, it is completely optional to pay.
There’s nothing wrong with any app being unprofitable IMO. Public transport and car infrastructure is unprofitable and we don’t have a problem with those… heck even my personal website is unprofitable, that’s about $200-300 a year being funnelled into something nobody uses or visits.
This is incorrect
Rossmann’s personal repair business is financially independent from his employer, FUTO, who only partially sponsors Rossmann’s R2R advocacy with the assistance of community donations. Rossmann frequently publishes hour long videos on his main channel crawling through the finances, and has spreadsheets online for public viewing where viewers can do an audit themselves
AFAICT, FUTO is comparable to organisations like NLNET - the same people at sponsor the Lemmy devs. The aim is generally not to fund projects forever, but to eventually open source them after they’ve been developed to the agreed level of functionality. Seeing as this app is mainly a Rossmann initiative there could be an exception here though - such as Rossmann donating his own money towards development.
I’m probably an exception then lol
Spoiler
A lot of people who follow Rossmann are passionate about R2R, actually owning what you pay for, and not giving excessive control to monopolies like Google.
Grayjay is more along the lines of this spirit, and as soon as they have their DHT video hosting thing ready I’ll gladly donate some of my storage space towards it 👌
So Rossmann is a lobbyist for an activist billionaire?
I think right to repair is important btw. Not questioning that.
Yep. And a right libertarian. I stopped watching him when he went from repair content to months long complaining about taxes and talking up Florida and Texas as some great place. Honestly, I am 100% convinced that the only reason he even cares about right to repair is for his work. He has shown no signs of caring about anyone else other than himself in any of the dozens of hours of content I watched of his.
I’m so glad I trained under Jessa at iPad Rehab instead of taking his course.
This is exactly it. I appreciate that he’s a strong advocate for it, and he’s a single issue voter/lobbyist, but he really wouldn’t care about it if it wasn’t his business. As can be seen in how, while he so strongly believes in a right for third parties to maintain hardware, he very clearly doesn’t believe in a right for third parties to maintain software with this app being source-available and not FLOSS.
He’s always felt off to me. And it’s not just because I’m into Apple products. I find it hard to articulate. But I see I’m not alone, thanks for sharing.
Yeah I was in the industry when he got big, and it was hard not to love his anger towards Apple, but eventually it became apparent he was just an angry person and Apple was only his current target. Once he had secured his platform, he felt more comfortable to share his absurd views, and I fear he influenced many impressionable people towards the right with his rhetoric. Dude is not who I want representing the repair community.
Why does everybody seem to know all of this dirt about Louis except me? I’ve seen this “be suspicious of anything Rossman is involved in” comment a few times in the past few days. I’m out of the loop.
Billionaire, actually.
The billionaire (Eron Wulf) is also the founder of FUTO. They don’t have investors.
There are plenty of projects that take donations/payments that don’t make profit but stay afloat, normally through the team behind it paying the bills. I guess it depends what the running costs actually are, and if it’s for people or e.g. servers.
Kodi is one of them
I was excited about this but it’s mobile only?
With how locked down mobile is compared to desktop I think it’s a good thing to start with mobile
WDYM by locked down?
Agreed, great start for the project
I wouldn’t classify it as a better revanced, but that doesn’t matter, thanks for sharing this awesome tool I really liked it, I first started incorporating Matrix in my life, then a couple days ago Lemmy, and now this, it’s great
What is this Matrix you are talking about?
https://matrix.org/
Search for Elements aswell with Matrix
Interesting, thank you for sharing.
You are welcome 🤗
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please edit this post to remove the incorrect claim that this is open source, as it is clearly not.
It is not free software but it is open source. Stop gatekeeping the term. I can look at the code and modify it to my hearts content. I can also watch as the project is being developed. That means it’s open source. It would be free software if you where also allowed to redistribute it but I can fully see why they do not want that
i guess you didn’t click the link in my comment? here is another, with a list of governments and other entities who all agree about the definition: https://opensource.org/authority/
Oh so what you’re trying to say is that, because the license they chose is not on this list, it’s not open source. Stupid take IMO but you do you
It isn’t about the list of approved licenses, it’s about the criteria for being added to the list. New licenses regularly meet the definition. This license clearly does not.
so what Edward Snowden developed a closed source license
oh cool, if Edward Snowden did it I guess software freedom isn’t important anymore 🙄
But seriously, did he? which one? I’m not familiar with that.
But even if he did release something under one, I would be extremely surprised if he called a non-free license “open source” as FUTO is doing here.
top 10 most deserving people to be on an emkay video number 2:
edit: also i borderline didn’t understand what he was saying
The source is freely available, but it does not fit the common definition of open source. Namely, you’re not allowed to redistribute with tracking, malware, or adds. I guess this has been a problem with piped?
Yes, this has been a major issue for NewPipe, see here.
I have found three comments from you, where you insert yourself as an expert on what Open Source is/not is. Although you do link to some sources, you do so without arguing your point. IMO this is not a constructive way of communication. Since I believe your perspective is purist but overall not too helpful, I will go through the trouble an actually argue the point:
Your problem is following sentence published by the OSI: “The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources.” Which FUTO does - they won’t allow you to put ads on top of their software and distribute it. But I hope that you would agree with me that GNU GPL is an Open Source License. However, they do have a copyleft which practically makes selling software impossible. If you use a library which uses the GPL, you have to make your sources available - which makes selling a compiled version a difficult task…
If we look at Wikipedia, we see following sentence: “Generally, open source refers to a computer program in which the source code is available to the general public for use or modification from its original design.”, Grayjay fulfils this. Wikipedia continues: “{…}. Depending on the license terms, others may then download, modify, and publish their version {…}”, you are allowed to download and modify Grayjay. They do not allow you to commercially distribute your modifications, which is a license term.
Lets look at a big OSS company. Red Hat writes: “An open source development model is the process used by an open source community project to develop open source software. The software is then released under an open source license, so anyone can view or modify the source code.” These criteria are fulfilled by the FUTO TEMPORARY LICENSE (Last updated 7 June 2023). Red Hat does not mention the right to redistribute anywhere I could find it.
To those who actually read up to this point: I hope you find this helpful to form your own opinion based on your own research.
You can argue that “open source” can mean other things that what the OSI defined it to mean, but the truth of the matter is that almost everyone thinks of the OSI or similar definition when they talk about “open source”. Insisting on using the term this way is deliberately misleading. Even your own links don’t support your argument.
A bit further down in the Wikipedia page is this:
And if you go to the main article, it is apparent that the OSI definition is treated as the de fact definition of open source. I’m not going to quote everything, but here are examples of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Definitions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_software#Open-source_versus_source-available
And from Red Hat, literally the first sentence
And if we follow that link:
But the Red Hat page is a bad source anyway because it is written like a short intro and not a formal definition of the concept. Taking a random sentence from it and arguing that it doesn’t mention distribution makes no sense.
Here is a more comprehensive page from Red Hat, that clearly states that they evaluate whether a license is open source based on OSI and the FSF definitions.
since you copy+pasted this wall of confused text to me in 3 different places I guess I’ll reply here too, in the not-deleted thread: https://opensource.org/authority/ (this is not even a controversial topic)
This whole discussion is like arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It depends completely on how you define open source, and there is no single universally agreed upon definition. Per this article, there are over 80 variations of open source licenses all with different term and conditions. Some are more permissive, some less so. Yet they can all be considered a variation of open source, though I’m anticipating you wouldn’t agree? For this particular app, there are some restrictions in place aimed to protect users from malicious forks. IMO this is a good thing. I can’t understand why you are acting like the definition police here, it seems very pedantic tbh.
There is an overwhelmingly agreed-upon definition. Look at who agrees with it: https://opensource.org/authority/
And who doesn’t agree? Historically, a few of the giant software companies who were threatened by the free software movement thought that “open source” was a way for them to talk the talk without walking the walk. However, years ago, even they all eventually agreed about OSI’s definition and today they use terms like source-available software for their products that don’t meet it.
Today it is only misinformed people like yourself, and grifters trying to profit off of the positive perception of the term. I’m assuming Louis Rossman is in the former category too; we’ll see in the near future if he acknowledges that the FUTO license is not open source and/or relicenses the project under an open source license.
There are many open source licenses, and many non-open-source licenses. there is a list of licenses which OSI has analyzed and found to meet their definition; licenses which aren’t on that list can be open source too… but to see if they are, you would need to read the license and the definition.
Have you read The Open Source Definition? I’m assuming not.
It’s because (1) FUTO are deceiving their customers by claiming that their product is something which it isn’t, and (2) they’re harming the free and open source software movements by telling people that terms mean things contrary to what they actually mean.
You make some good points, but whether it exactly meets every criteria of open source software as per that definition or not, I really can’t bring myself to care that much either way. I get that it’s important to you, and that’s fine, but not everyone cares that much about it. People can read and vet the source code, the intention of the project seems good, and the intention of the authors in deviating slightly from pure open source principles seems to be to protect their users from scammy clones, which also seems fine with me. TBH we’re not really into strictly following the letter of the law in the pirate community, and if this app helps people to avoid surveillance capitalism and puts even the slightest dent in Google’s massive profits then I’m all for it. Anyways, have a good one.
saying that prohibiting redistribution is just “deviating slightly from pure open source principles” is like saying that a dish with a bit of meat in it is just “deviating slightly” from a vegetarian recipe.
if you saw a restaurant labeling their food as vegetarian because their dishes were based on vegetarian recipes, but had some meat added, would you say that it seems like their intentions are good?
As I said in another comment, the way free open source software projects should (and can, and do) generally do this is using trademark law. He could license it under any free software license but require derivatives to change the name to avoid misleading or confusing users. This is what Firefox and many other projects do.
In the video announcing the project Louis Rossmann explicitly says he intends to vigorously enforce this license. Since it is a copyright license, the only ways of actually enforcing it are to send DMCA takedowns and/or sue people for copyright infringement.
What fresh hell of goalpost moving is this? You’re so bad faith.
https://gitlab.futo.org/videostreaming/grayjay/-/blob/master/LICENSE: FUTO TEMPORARY LICENSE It seems like it’s more CC non-commercial and not truly libre but I can understand why someone would say open source.
I can understand why too: it’s either because they were not aware of the widely agreed-upon definition of the term, or because they’re being disingenuous. I’m assuming it was the former; whether OP edits the post will reveal if it was actually the latter.
Oh go on you absolute fucking blowhard. Go print out a copy of osi and jerk off in your closet and leave the rest if us functional adults alone.
ReVanced taps into my history with microg. When I watch stuff on desktop with Firefox and uBlock Origin, I want those videos to show as watched on my phone when I open ReVanced so I don’t get recommended the same stuff. That works.
GrayJay can’t do this. It’s not better. It’s a good idea, but it’s a side grade.
Grayjay can do this - there is a toggle in the settings for the YouTube addin to sync watch data with your Google account.
It’s a one-time sync though. If I want history from what I watched on my desktop today I have to resync.
I just want Smarttube Next for mobile.
STN has a huge privacy problem in that it has to be connected to a Google account.
I don’t believe STN has to be connected to a Google account
Correct. There’s no need to login.
That’s the exact opposite of what most people want from an app like this.
It’s what I want from an app like this 🤷♂️
As lemann pointed out there’s a setting for that in the YT add-on im the sources tab, not the app settings. Also myself and others have had loading issues with Revanced. It’ll start playing, suddenly start buffering and never stops. Grayjay works as it should and still has the settings I want from Revanced. Not to argue, just want to let others in my situation know Grayjay is the upgrade we need.
I had that issue and it was because I needed to update Revanced.
That’s what I saw in a reddit post way back but updating and reinstall never fixed it. I was using YT on browser for a while just because it was more reliable and didn’t have ads. UI sucked ass though. Ky biggest critique on Grayjay so far is the lack of vertical swipes to adjust volume/brightness.
I’m having the same problem with revanced right now. Buffering and pausing and often never recovering.
Make the jump to Grayjay, my friend. It’s worth it.
Thanks, I actually have it installed and I’ve been playing with it. It’s been playing smoothly.
The problem is that the authentication with my account is failing, so I can’t get my subscriptions and watch history. I’m still working on figuring it out
Godly
can’t import subscriptions from YouTube or any other platform
If you open your subscriptions JSON, it will just open in the app and start loading your subs.
You can import YouTube subscriptions by clicking on the Sources tab and then tapping on the YouTube source (says tap to open in small print). You can then sign in and after that you’ll have import subscriptions as well as import playlists buttons.
awesome, thanks
Is there SponserBlock support?
If it supported both SponserBlock and DeArrow I’d switch in a heartbeat. Until then I’ll stick to ReVanced.
what’s DeArrow?
It replaces clickbait titles and thumbnails with more reasonable community-provided ones. From the same developers as sponserblock.
I don’t think so
Not as far as I can see but it is in alpha
No. At least not yet
Tried playing YouTube and it kept crashing and gave up. I’m happy with NewPipe
Better than Revanced? So it can access all my watch history, comments, votes, subscriptions, etc? If not, then it’s not better for me.
“Not compatible with my device” sadly. Probably Android version since my phone is old as all fuck.
If you’re trying through the app store I would suggest the website, it has a few different options including non ARM device architecture!
OP, did you purposely leave the Nazi hangout sites that this is meant to serve out of your content examples? The places that are generally career death sentences for the “cancelled”?
I generally like Louis, but this project seems like it will mostly be a tool for the rightfully de-platformed to retain an audience for their disinformation and hate.
Not a win for me right out the gate.
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I hear you, I’m just not sure the % of actually legit cases of good people “lost” in YouTube’s broken system, where this app will be helpful, won’t be just completely dwarfed by the number of irredeemable dirtbags it helps keep their candles lit so they can live another day to shout about how you should drink bleach instead of utilizing legitimate modern medicine.
Frankly the vast majority of my favorite creators have not been able to handle youtube and most have moved onto Twitch, where I’m not so interested in watching. Banned from YouTube though, or demonetized? Now we’re talking about ~5 creators Ive watched instead of hundreds.
Then just… don’t use those platforms? If you’re so afraid they’ll convert you.
Not afraid for myself friend, afraid for the more easily misled, the ones that likely live in your mirrors at home.
If you have people living in your mirrors at home, you have much bigger problems than I can help you with, sorry.
Woooosshhhh!
Noo, I have to ban other people from using them too! People can’t be allowed to do things I don’t like!
Waitwhaaat?
I, uh - honestly wasn’t aware of it - I mentioned examples that I was somewhat aware/familiar with…
It honestly didn’t cross my mind with the nazi shit 💀💀
Oh SHIT this is the first time I’m being made aware of that.