- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
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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basically Newpipe but only source available, not really free software or open source, so they are restricting your freedoms.
Just keep using Newpipe instead.
It is open source but you can’t publish modified code (this is to ensure there will be no malicious forks like there was with newpipe)
plus you missed the entire point:
… app for watching online video content - not just youtube, but nebula, peertube, twitch and more.
It’s an app that allows you to watch the same creators across many platforms
It is open source but you can’t publish modified code
That’s not what most people consider “open source”.
It’s pretty hilarious that Rossman thinks malicious forks are going to care about the license, lol. Malicious devs clone Candy Crush and every other proprietary app they can find just to insert ads or maybe malware. Plus, basic trademark law already allows fighting fake apps, I don’t see how such a restrictive license is supposed to help.
That’s not the problem. The question is, stopping actors that put ads and paywalls behind modified source, which technically isn’t malicious, it’s just being a jerk and this licensing makes it much easier to take down. Ofc, if he actually wanted it to be open source, he’d just force all derivatives to be non commercial.
A non-commercial license is generally not considered to be FOSS (“open source”). If you build a great, ad-free version that forks off because you disagree with some decision (i.e. you have a fancy recommendation algorithm that upstream doesn’t like), normal open source would allow you to sell access to that app.
I get that he wants a “just in case” clause to take down forks Rossmann doesn’t like, but the way it’s stated makes the project sound dickish.
Yeah… You’re not going to stop any of that without war.
Oh yeah, because someone who wants to do that is going to see that and think oh no, he doesn’t want us to, guess we shouldn’t
That’s not the point. The point is takedown actions being a lot easier especially if one of the idiots tries to argue against
The point is, that anyone who tries to make money by ad-bombing the app and adding it to the playstore will be punished. If you post your virus-infected fork in the far-behind edge of internet-nowhere Louis would not care about that. Otherwise: why do you not ask him yourself if you want to post your own fork and under which conditions that should be possible. If you ride principles, then develop your own app that is much much better and FOSS than grayjay. Nobody stops you.
I mean, at least in this case he can take down fake copies from the most popular app stores. That mitigates the reach of malicious clones a lot.
Rossman is an idiot, that’s how. Luckily he’s a useful idiot in most cases.
I half expected this from Rossman, but he hasn’t written a single line of code. The license seems to have been partially copy pasted from somewhere else, probably by one of the devs. Surely they would’ve informed him about how stupid the license idea is, or at least told him to ask his lawyer.
Luckily the title does state “temporary license”, maybe they’ll swap it out for a normal license down the line.
FUTO Temporary License (FTL) violates the following open-source principles:
- Open source licenses must allow free redistribution. FTL allows license suspension and termination at any time, without notice, for any or no reason.
- Open source licenses must allow source code distribution. FTL allows restrictions to access the code at any time, without notice, for any or no reason.
- Open source licenses must allow modifications. FTL allows modifications only for non-commercial use, or maybe not even that. FTL dodges the word modifications here, no clue.
- Open source licenses must explicitly allow distribution of software built from modified source code. FTL forbids distribution of software built from modified source code for commercial use.
- Open source licenses must not discriminate against persons/groups and fields of endeavor. FTL allows license suspension and termination at any time, without notice, for any or no reason.
The FTL enables the following practices:
- Copyright holders can change the license terms.
- Copyright holders can re-license everything.
- Copyright holders can target specific groups and individuals with discriminatory license terms.
- Copyright holders can close source everything.
- Copyright holders can forbid specific groups and individuals from using their work.
Wow, this is a high quality comment.
I guess it’s understandable to be concerned about licensing when putting money and work into a project like this, but I still hope they change their mind.
“open source” to enshittification pipeline license
Your avatar is not ironic, is it?
newpipe does YouTube, SoundCloud, Peertube, and Bandcamp. NewPipe isn’t YouTube-Only.
It does them very poorly
FLOSS or die
Whew
The term “open source” generally refers to the definition by the Open Source Initiative.
Not allowing publishing of modified source code is in violation with the criteria of open source.
It is open source but you can’t publish modified code (this is to ensure there will be no malicious forks like there was with newpipe)
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that is not open source. That is source available.
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because we all know that license agreements are a line that trojan distributors will not cross. Not malware distribution, not hacking laws, but copyright infringement. They’d never do that at all.
because we all know that license agreements are a line that trojan distributors will not cross. Not malware distribution, not hacking laws, but copyright infringement. They’d never do that at all.
I believe it would be significantly easier to submit a takedown request for copyright issues, compared to reporting an app for being malicious.
That’s not the case at all. These kind of Trojan operations are fly-by-night setups, and have the advantage of being able to react far faster than the official Devs. By the time you as the dev even know of the app’s existence, they’ve already infected hundreds. And when you do get round to filing a takedown notice, they’ll be back up the next day under a different name.
Even Nintendo can’t get copyright infringing shit off Play Store in any fast capacity. Heck, Google will even run ads for people blatantly breaking copyright laws.
Edit: and that’s before considering that Google won’t let them onto play store and being only source available excludes them from eligibility for official F-Droid repos. They’re going to have an absolute bitch of a time dealing with fakes and Trojans, even if they didn’t release the source code at all
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…so it’s newpipe.
You can’t search multiple platforms at once with newpipe. This is a bigger thing that you think.
Also it has recommendations
I could not find a link to the source on the website 🤔 do you know where the source is?
I don’t believe newpipe has a way to cast so that’s what I’m interested in here
If you watch the video, Louis explains why they only made it source available
Nah, Louis explains that the app is open-source, but describes open-source as source-available.
Have you used it? It’s like NewPipe except that it’s better in almost every way. The ONLY downside is that it’s just old-fashioned open source instead of FOSS.
It’s not open source
Source available has never been the definition of open-source.
Incorrect. People have been calling random software open source since the 80s, because it’s a very vague term. The new definition that you think is gospel wasn’t invented until the OSI was formed in '98.
“open source” is a self explanatory phrase. The source code is open, therefore it’s open source.
It’s not open source. It’s source available.
Its open source, not free software.
Although, its basically perpetual license shareware.
No one is holding a gun to anyones head and forcing them to buy it
Indeed.
It’s not open source…but the source is open.
Not the same
Yeah but their sentence is correct:
The project is not open source (in terms of FOSS) but the source is open.
The whole license stuff is complicated enough, why are we using confusing technical terms?
Open source should be open source and free and modifyable source should be sth else
The source is literally not “open”. It doesn’t make sense to say that without referring to open source.
Saying the source is available to see, that makes sense though.There have always been multiple definitions of “open source”. That’s why it’s always best to specify. If you mean FOSS, say FOSS. Don’t use an ambiguous term like “open source”.
Open source is not an ambiguous term. FOSS stands for “free and open source software”. It extends the word you claim is ambiguous with the word “free”. That word actually is ambiguous as in other cases it could mean “gratis” and not “it grants it’s users freedom”.
How is that better than the more established term with the very clear definition by the OSI? It’s okay if you mixed these terms up. I just don’t understand what you’re trying to do here.Then everyone should stop using “open source” or there’s going to be arguments over what counts as open source every single time.
Well luckily there’s no arguments necessary, as we have the definition by the OSI. I actually rarely see any discussion about that, and when I do it’s mostly ill-informed comment sections.
Yes, that’s what I’m saying. But as you can tell from this whole thread, it’s not going well. LOL.
that’s called source-available
Exactly
It is an interesting project, not sure where it goes. The title is deeply misleading though. The features of ReVanced make YouTube so much better, whereas this project doesn’t seem to be about making YouTube better so much as circumnavigating YouTube for the comment boxes and as your hub to creators. They seem to be doing different things.
What do they do differently?
So, I really want to be optimistic about this project. I love that it integrates multiple sources, that it lets you use different identities that are not attached to any of these services. I installed it and already paid for it even, because I love initiatives like this.
I think it’s unsustainable. In 5 years, everyone who’d use the app’s already paid for it, which means the devs have no incentive to continue to work, and funding dries up. When that happens, they’ll of course just let the app run until the plugins stop working. Nobody will be able to pick it up and continue development in an open forum because it’s not FLOSS.
My hope is they re-license it under a copyleft license later, but I’m not optimistic about that happening. With how things are now, it does appear to be doomed to enshittification.
Yeah FOSS or FLOSS (your teeth ^^) is the only viable solution we have found that really works. It’s like Democracy IMO, criticize them all you want but that’s the only ones that works over time.
As long as Rossmann has a say in the ordeal I doubt it’ll enshittify. If it they can’t carry it anymore, I think they’ll re-license it.
But in any case, I’m really glad to see effort toward this. Because I may be naive, but I think this will make viewers & potential devs aware that it’s possible to have a great experience consuming video without being tied up in Youtube’s basement, and I predict will inspire more FOSS in the same vein.You just described why subscriptions are rampant in the software industry.
We use to have upgrade pricing and paid major revisions for software. But things changed to progressive models. And then things like what you described came along over extended periods of time.
Yes, subscriptions are probably the closest there is to sustainable development in a proprietary framework
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.
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
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 🤷♂️
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.
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?
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.
Rossmann has a millionaire backing up his repair business
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
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
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.
The app is niche and I can’t see too many people paying for a license
I’m probably an exception then lol
Spoiler
I also can’t see too many workers staying unless they are passionate. Something isn’t adding up unless I’m wrong.
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.
the only reason he even cares about right to repair is for his work
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.
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
Rossmann has a millionaire backing up his repair business
Billionaire, actually.
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?
The billionaire (Eron Wulf) is also the founder of FUTO. They don’t have investors.
Rossmann has a millionaire backing up his repair business among other things.
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.
I just bought the FUTO voice input app as well from them and it’s genuinely amazing. It has punctuation where it needs to. It cuts out all the UM’s. And the best part is, I don’t have to pretend that I’m talking to a robot. I can just speak as if I’m talking to a normal person and it gets it right nearly every single time. It is so worth the $5.
This entire comment was typed with it, and I did not edit a single thing.
Thank you so much for this suggestion. It’s really a great step towards the end of tedious voice messages. Works great but is a bit slow when using the multilang voice model. I don’t mind.
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?
Search for Elements aswell with Matrix
Interesting, thank you for sharing.
You are welcome 🤗
It sounds interesting, but… Android only? I don’t actually watch much video on my phone. It’s mostly on my desktop browser.
Not optimal, but using Waydroid on Linux, Android apps feel almost like they run natively (no need to start a emulator manually).
GTK Thanks
There are no ad blocking YouTube apps on iOS so I suspect Apple blocks them. The DMA will soon let us in the EU install whatever we like, but fuck Apple.
There is uYou+ but its not on the appstore so its pretty much impossible to install
You can side load it with AltStore or SideStore, it’s pretty straightforward
Maybe with windows. On linux i spent a solid few hours on it before giving up.
Gotta start somewhere.
They also have a (Chrome)cast tool that other apps can use. That application is actually open source too (MIT licensed) rather than the “source available (sort of)” license the Android app has.
Publishing on iOS creates a whole plethora of hurdles because everything you install has to first be approved by Apple. This is an Apple problem. The founder of the company has said he doesn’t like developing for iOS for this reason.
It’s not enough to make work around for YouTube. We need a new YouTube.
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.
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.
He talked about saving videos from being deleted when you lose one of your accounts, so it’s in the works
There are several "new YouTube"s. The problem is getting people to transition to them. And this is intended to do exactly that.
What’s Piped?
Piped is alternative frontend, so still youtube
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.
That’s basically what it is
Note to pirates: the app still asks you to pay.
Not hard to work around (just have to bypass these files) but the license does state that they can take down any forks for any reason or no reason at all, so I don’t expect an easy to use free fork to stay up unless they make enough money to sustain development.
Wdym by bypass and those files ? I am sorry, but do you mean u need to edit something, delete or overwrite ?
Edit the files, make sure they
return truewhenever there’s a payment check in the code, and recompile the app. Shouldn’t be too hard.To get around the Rossman license issue you can probably publish just a patch file with none of the original source code so people can build their own patched versions of the app.
They can get forks taken down from legit places like GitHub, but this is the piracy community, isn’t it?
Anyway, have you actually used the app? It’s fucking amazing, it works flawlessly in my experience. I played with it for an hour and immediately gave them ten bucks, it’s better than NewPipe, ReVanced, everything I’ve tried.
Smart pirates keep everything but the stolen stuff above board. Sonarr isn’t illegal, using Sonarr to download movies usually is. Same with yt-dlp. In this case, the piracy part that’s supposed to be above board is the code itself.
I did test the app, it felt close to the youtube app but it wasn’t as good in my opinion. It’s probably an excellent client for the built-in services it lists that I’ve never heard of, but I only have access to Youtube and Patreon and Patreon doesn’t work.
I do see a nice future for it in the piracy community nonetheless. It should be easy to add a Plex/Jellyfin plugin, maybe a Kemono plugin for Patreon, and probably a bunch of plugins for your average ad-infested streaming site.
there could be a patchset made with ReVanced-CLI. It’s an easy bypass if you know a bit of Java/Kotlin, even with release APKs
True, patching the app through revanced every update is kind of a pain though. Prepatched APKs seem to be a lot more popular for piracy.
You don’t need to bypass anything. You can just not pay and the app will continue functioning just fine.
It’s the WinRAR model.
The patching is meant to convey that message of never paying, by removing the option and prompts + nags to pay, as well as create the experience of an app that is entirely free without such nags. Such patches exist for WinRAR as well to enhance user experience.
Is there SponserBlock support?
If it supported both SponserBlock and DeArrow I’d switch in a heartbeat. Until then I’ll stick to ReVanced.
No. At least not yet
I don’t think so
Not as far as I can see but it is in alpha
what’s DeArrow?
It replaces clickbait titles and thumbnails with more reasonable community-provided ones. From the same developers as sponserblock.
I really hope they add sponsorblock and dearrow support in the future because this is a truly awesome app.
Dearrow is so nice, fuck them clickbaits.
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
Sadly it’s for the large part the recommendation algorithm that I’m on YouTube for. Most of the videos I watch are from people I’m not subscribed to.
I’ve always wondered if people like you existed! Fascinating.
Not criticizing you, just personally I don’t want any recommendation algos in any of my media.
Yeah people have mixed opinions about that, but atleast in my case YouTube’s recommendations does a really good job at finding content I’m interested in. It just needs some training for it to do a good job. When there’s something I’m not interested in, I just flag it as “not interested” and then that stuff dissapears and is replaced with something else.
Interesting- It’s really bad for me!
It always keeps suggestion the same few things, and things from the channels I’m already subscribed to. Videos I’ve already watched often get in there, and it’s very rare I get suggestions for relevant creators.
Oh yeah it works great, I just don’t like how the algo feels like it’s trying to trick me into watching as long as possible. I enjoy the things I subscribe to but I don’t need YouTube to take up any more of my time.
I don’t agree, you need a way to discover new stuff (akin to going to /all). What I do hate is how they don’t give you the option to do anything but that. Or they give the option but it’s incredibly annoying so you don’t use it. Like you can’t trust YouTube to show you the content from the people you’re subscribed to. You can’t trust them to even show their content on the homepage of the channel if you want to be sure you didn’t miss anything interesting you have to go channel by channel clicking in the videos and live tabs for anything the algorithm might deem not worthy
You could not force me at gunpoint to go to r/all lol but I see your point. I just like to be more intentional about it.
I follow way to many creators to have a sensible subscription feed, especially when I only watch some videos from some channels. If there were tiered subscriptions, I’d use them more. But right now I only use subscriptions for my tier 1.
I couldn’t live without my Spotify recommendations. Being able to listen to new stuff everyday is so important to me.
I get it. My Spotify algorithm was exceptionally good at sending me stuff that was basically just “diet everything else in my library”. Hardly anything ever new or challenging. Most of my new interesting music comes to me these days from friends and the radio, and song IDing anything that catches my ear while out and about.
I suppose I do like Spotify auto-playlists for when I need consistent background Muzak or a “chill beats to study to” vibe. But the algo is just too “good” if that makes sense.
I’m the same way, I watch (hate to admit) hours of YouTube every day. I do subscribe to a lot of people, but only after I’ve seen several of their videos and enjoyed them. Primarily I refresh the homepage and see if anything peeks my interest. In my personal opinion YouTube has one of the best algorithms, generally showing me a good mix of stuff I’m interested in (with addons and whatnot to hide the bullshit and recommended MSM garbage). Conversely Instagram and Facebook have some of the consistently worst algorithms, but I think Facebook is getting better about it, Instagram however NEVER shows me ANYTHING I could ever possibly care about and usually actively get annoyed by.
It also has that. You can login with google
You don’t even need to subscribe and get recommendations
I was pleasantly surprised to see that it still carries that over! My Home feed (not subscriptions) has plenty of videos from channels I’m not subscribed to
