I’m self-hosting Piped and couldn’t be happier. Clean, distraction free and, importantly, private. No data mining. Importing your subscriptions from a Google Takeout dump is simple.
LibreTube for Android is my mobile client, and talks to my Piped server without any issues. The only thing missing at this stage is a client for my Chromecast GTVs. For those, I still watch YouTube with SmartTubeNext, which means keeping two sets of subscriptions in sync. A little frustrating, but relatively painless, for the privacy benefits.
Freetube, Individious, Piped, CloudTube, PokeTube, Tubo, Yattee are the main ones I know of. If you want be automatically redirected to alternative youtube frontends installed Lib Redirect.
GrayJay just came out into the testing phase. It not only supportsYouTubee but also Nebula, Odysee, Twitch, PeerTube and a few others with more to come. Works great so far. grayjay.app. Built by Futo, a nonprofit company which Louis Rossmann works for. His video here
On android i like newpipe + sponsorblock and clipious. Id use clipious all the time but it sometimes doesnt play and then i fall back on newpipe. Newpipe has downloading too.
I dont use youtube much on desktop but when i do i use invidious
It combines YouTube and Twitch into one platform in a really intuitive way. Has its own comment system and rating system for videos. No ads obviously. It’s a whole fucking thing and it’s incredible.
Also PS You are looking at the universal APK, which contains the binaries for all CPU structures. OBVIOUSLY the one that’s meant for your phone will be smaller. Mine was like 170 mb
Dude it’s basically nothing. Mp3s have been/could be considered small for like 10+ years. It’s much larger than I think it should be but it’s not like it’s an unreasonable space hog. File sizes have been inflating steadily for years as internet speeds increase worldwide
So what’s the actual problem is? It’s just a front end to other platforms, they will not lock you in and than break the app. You can use it and if it goes bad you switch to other front end. I would understand the ‘not free’ objections if it was a tool you introduce into our workflow that would later be hard to replace. Here there’s no lock in. What do you care if it can be forked?
Some people (including me) care about software freedom. The ability to fork and redistribute software while continuing to publish any changes to the code is great.
Not using an open source license but a source available license is not something that I like to see, but it’s their right to do so. There’re enough open source YouTube frontends like NewPipe and LibreTube.
PS: What I really don’t like is them using the term open source. Open source is a well known term that’s well defined. Source available describes exactly what this app is without implying the freedoms associated with open source.
With some tools open source has many advantages, with others it’s mostly about transparency. IMHO this case is the latter case. You won’t gain much by being able to fork it. I don’t like it when people criticize projects only because those don’t align with their personal philosophy. Don’t use it if you don’t like it but there’s really no good reason for others to avoid it.
All people have their priorities. For most people on this community it’s probably being free of cost but for some freedom is also important.
I also don’t recommend against using software that’s not perfect according to my personal philosophy, but I think it’s important to point out any advantages and disadvanages so that anyone can decide for themselves. As I said, most people on here won’t care about the difference between source available and open source.
it’s mostly about transparency
Good point. If they’d use the term source available I’d have nothing to say. The reason I’m so pedantic is because increasingly businesses try to gain good publicity by calling their software open source while using Business Source License and similar, which are source available licenses.
I’ll definitly follow this project and look where it’s going.
Yes, your info is stored locally so you dont need to login to the YouTube API, i use newpipe to watch the videos and read some comments, not to interact or upload videos since that’s impossible on newpipe
Add comment