Guide: FIX your YOUTUBE EXPERIENCE: no ads, offline video, no algorithm, and more!

Tech AltWeb
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I want to share some tools and apps, and since I can’t mention most of these in a yt comment section, I’ll list all of them here.

Nick did a round-up of most of the important ones, so I encourage you to watch this video. It takes balls to put all the things that break terms of service in one youtube video :smiley: They are safe, you don’t risk a ban or anything, but Louis Rossmann got strikes for talking about NewPipe and Grayjay, for example. I’ll add a transcripts with links, just in case. As he mentions, be mindful of using these, since they kinda cut yt out of the trade (YouTube doesn’t even know you watched the video in the first place), the creators get nothing out of the free views, so remember to support them in other ways.
New Project(3)-00.00.00.000-00.00.02.557

Video transcript, just in case. I formatted a bit the output from Whisper-JAX for clarity.

Intro

Hey everyone, this is Nick and today I’m going to shoot myself in the foot and hurt my YouTube business just to tell you how you can fix every annoying thing that YouTube does. Because, let’s be honest, YouTube is the biggest video platform out there. But they have abused that power again and again and done some very controversial UX decisions that have annoyed a lot of you. So it’s only fair that I start talking about how you can fix all of this. And of course there isn’t enough time in the world to mention every extension, every tweak or every alternative website that you can use to make YouTube better. So if you have recommendations, let me know and let everyone else know down in the comments.

(Sponsor)

Thanks to Tuxcare for sponsoring this video. If you’ve ever worked on a project using PHP, you know how frustrating it is to know that the version you’re using is going end-of-life and that you’re going to have to upgrade to it quickly with a bunch of refactoring and code rewrites. Well, TuxCare can now help you to plan that transition thanks to their PHP extended lifecycle support. With that new service, you can keep your existing codebase and still receive security updates and patches to PHP, even if it’s no longer officially supported. This means that if your codebase still meets your operational requirements, it can also still meet your security requirements, and you get some more time to plan the transition. If you want to learn more about TuxCare’s PHP extended lifecycle support you can click on the link in the description below. (https://bit.ly/3VnYqJn)

Why would you want to “fix” youtube?

So why would you want to improve or fix your YouTube experience? Well first there are all the things YouTube does in terms of UX that are kinda user hostile. The removal of the dislike button made it harder to identify bad or harmful videos. They’re locking good quality 4K videos behind YouTube premium. And they’re experimenting with putting more unskippable ads at the beginning of videos. And look, ad revenue on YouTube is a third of my total revenue from running this YouTube channel. So it’s not in my interest to tell you to block ads or remove some of YouTube’s features. But honestly, I’ve been criticizing Google for a lot of things. And it would be kind of unethical of me to not criticize YouTube for the same things. So yes, ethics won’t feed me, but at least I’ll be able to sleep at night. So then there’s the YouTube algorithm which has a tendency to put people into a nice bubble of samey content to reinforce their already existing beliefs. And while that is comfortable, it’s not super open-minded and it clearly leads to some big societal issues, especially when you are talking about conspiracy theories or political bias. It is always better to try and find things you want to watch instead of being told what you should watch next. And if you only listen to ASMR or if you only watch anime shitposts, it doesn’t make a lot of a difference, but if you’re watching more serious topics, it can be really harmful to stick to the same bubble. And finally, there’s the privacy issue. Because using YouTube means giving Google a ton of information about what you like and what you think, whether you’re logged in or not. Yeah, if you thought not using a Google account protects you from being tracked, you greatly underestimate Google’s new powers. So with all of this, apart from the traditional ad blockers and tracker blockers, what can we do?

Alternative websites

The first obvious solution is to not use YouTube and move to another website. You have multiple alternatives to watch content, but they unfortunately all have issues. In the free of charge department, you have Odysse and Peertube. These platforms are basically like YouTube, but not controlled by a big company. They don’t track you, they don’t serve you ads, and they let you watch your videos in peace with all the basic features you would expect, like subscribing to a channel, changing the resolution, commenting, and more. And of course their major issue is that they’re not exhaustive, you’re not going to find every content creator you like on there unless you’re really lucky. And that’s myself included, assuming you like my content. I’m on Odyssey and all my videos are there(n.r. not anymore lol I'm leaving Odysee ⋅ The Linux Experiment), but on PeerTube, only a select few videos make it there thanks to the manager of the PeerTube instance which actually uploads those videos himself. Although this might change as PeerTube now lets content creators sync their entire channel from YouTube to PeerTube which means that you might finally be able to watch everything I make on PeerTube if you want. That’s the main issue. While you can find some of your favorite creators there, you will still have to use YouTube for a lot of others. Chances are, everyone you follow isn’t there yet. Then you have paid alternatives like Nebula or Floatplane. These offer high quality content from big channels and creators. And while you have to pay to view your videos, it helps support creators a lot more than depending on ad revenue. But these also suffer from the same problem. They don’t have everything. Both these platforms only add creators on a per channel basis and generally only invite people who are already big enough that they will generate some revenue and won’t waste bandwidth. My channel isn’t huge by any means, but at 220 000 subscribers and 1.2 million views per month, I’ve been denied access to Floatplane for a while and Nebula never invited me either, so I guess the threshold is at about 500 000 subs, which is totally understandable, but it still means that these platforms, while they’re cool, will not have everything, which means you still need YouTube. So let’s see how you can improve your YouTube experience.

Unofficial Youtube websites and apps

The first way would be to use alternative websites and applications that access YouTube content but don’t belong to Google. As such, they can let you watch videos offline, remove ads, sometimes even sponsored segments, and more. For mobile, you have applications like NewPipe PLEASE DOWNLOAD NewPipe FROM F-Droid OR GitHub. The Google Play VERSION IS FILLED WITH ADS., TubeMaster, or MyTube, and a lot of others. They all offer a lot of things, including some YouTube premium features, like letting you download videos for offline viewing, watching in picture-in-picture mode, better privacy, and more. And if you’re wondering why I’m not focusing more on the specific features of every one of these apps, it’s because some of these features might be against YouTube terms of service, which means that if I bring too much attention to them, they might get a nice cease and desist letter, which I wouldn’t want to be responsible for. This actually happened to YouTube Vanced, for example, which was a very popular alternative client and it had to shut down after it became too popular for its own good. So I will just let you know that these alternatives exist and I will let you look them up for yourself and decide if you like them or not. Not that my channel is big enough to attract enough attention to these apps that they would have to shut down, but you can never be too careful. And also I will let you know that the same person already recognized me 3 times in the streets of the city where I live, so you could say I’m pretty famous now. Now if you mostly watch YouTube on your laptop or desktop though, you’re pretty much stuck with the YouTube website. Some alternatives exist, but they’re either super slow, don’t work at all, or don’t have all the videos you might want. Now fortunately, we have browser extensions.

Browser Extensions

A big one will be YouTube Unhook. This one is meant to let you watch what you want and just what you want. It’s on Chrome and Firefox and it lets you hide the related videos YouTube displays next to the one you’re watching. You can remove the comments if these annoy you or you don’t want to be tempted to engage in yet another flame war. The suggestions will also vanish, just like the homepage recommendations, the trending tab and more. Basically, it gives you a pure YouTube experience where you get to pick what you want to watch without all the annoying commenting, nagging and suggesting that YouTube does to try and hook you into watching more. Then there’s the very famous return YouTube dislike button if you want to see this almighty ratio for the videos you watch. This one does exactly what it says. It makes the dislike button useful again and shows the number of dislikes under a video. It won’t be perfectly exact because it is based on archived data from the previous YouTube Dislike API and extrapolated user data, but it will be close enough to the real numbers to let you assess whether something is worth your time or not. It’s available for Chrome and Firefox. I guess most of you who really wanted the dislike button back already know about this extension, but if you didn’t, you’re welcome. And of course, you can also use any ad blocker or tracker blocker to stay as private as possible and remove all the annoying ads that you’ll view at the beginning of a video including on mine. And there’s also something called SponsorBlock which I really should not tell you about because it also hurts my business but basically it crowdsources the timestamps for sponsored mentions inside of videos and it auto skips them. (This bit gets skipped by the sponsorblock and the video jumps to Nick shaking his empty wallet) so you’re not going to watch me talk about Linode or anything else ever again. Oh no.

Build your own subscription feed with RSS

But what if you really do not want to use the YouTube website? Well, you have a simpler way, a way that transcends the ages and lets you get to your new videos in any client of your choice, through the magic of RSS feeds. Every channel URL that has an ID in it is also an RSS feed which means you can add it to any RSS client like Feedly or a desktop client like Newsflash for GNOME or Thunderbird. And if you don’t know about RSS because let’s face it it’s kind of old tech, it’s basically an aggregation system. In an aggregator you just add the RSS feeds of everything you want to follow and then when you open your RSS client you see all the new articles that have been published and you can click on them to open them or sometimes even just read them in the client. Now all YouTube channels have an RSS feed, which is just their URL. So you can basically rebuild your own subscription feed away from YouTube and only get the things you actually want to watch. It’s pretty neat. And you can also add other feeds that aren’t YouTube videos. So you can also escape other algorithms for the news you read. RSS might be old, but it’s very much alive and it’s, in my opinion, the best way to actually only get the news that you’re interested about. It’s a way better system than using Twitter, Google or Facebook to get your news.

Combine RSS + video downloads with a script to watch on a TV

And if you like watching YouTube videos on your TV but you don’t want to use the YouTube app, there’s a convoluted way but that will work nicely once it’s set up. Now be warned, it involves downloading YouTube videos, which is against YouTube’s terms of service. Proceed at your own risk. Basically, what you can do is write a script that pulls each new video from your subscription feed that you recreated using RSS. It downloads them with YouTube download and then stores them in a directory that’s used by your Plex server or local media center. With that script running as a cron task regularly, you can do that in the background of your home server and have access to all your videos when you come home waiting for you. It requires a little bit of elbow grease, but if you’re technically inclined, it’s not that hard to set up. I left a link to something that does quite the same thing in the description. (GitHub - psiie/youtube-dlp-subscriptions: An autodownloader for a list of youtube subscriptions. Utilizes a fork of yt-dl that makes use of SponsorBlock ; https://archive.ph/ajyK6 ; GitHub - psiie/youtube-dlp-subscriptions: An autodownloader for a list of youtube subscriptions. Utilizes a fork of yt-dl that makes use of SponsorBlock , Wayback Machine)

Support your creators

Now, all these methods will undoubtedly harm your favorite creators a bit. Like it or not, when you don’t have ads enabled, when you skip sponsors, when you don’t like or comment, or when you watch offline, you’re not contributing to the success of a video or to the financial well-being of a creator. And of course that’s entirely up to you because I believe that your computer is your computer and you should use it in the exact way that you want to use it. So if you want to skip ads, skip sponsors, and download videos, go ahead. But it’s still important to keep that in mind. It’s going to hurt the creators you watch. Now, if you have the finances and you’re willing, remember to help your favorite video creators when you decide to use these methods. We mostly all have Patreons or equivalents or one-time donation links in our video descriptions. And if you want to help us make these videos, it’s always appreciated. Optional, of course, but appreciated.

Final thoughts

So that’s about it. There are plenty of ways to escape the YouTube algorithm. Suggestions, ads and more. Some of them might not exactly be authorized by YouTube. Some are, but all of them should improve your watching experience if you’re tired of the YouTube website but still want to see what we create. And of course there’s always the easy way to support your creators just by watching them which is called YouTube Premium, but I’m no shill so I’m not going to talk more about it here. So hopefully this video is allowed to exist on YouTube, isn’t demonetized and doesn’t generate a strike on my channel because you never know. And hopefully it helped you make an informed decision regarding your YouTube experience.

(Sponsor: Get a device that runs Linux perfectly)

Just like you can make an informed decision when you buy your next computer from today’s sponsor. Tuxedo is a company based in Germany and they make laptops and desktops that they ship worldwide and that run Linux out of the box. And if you’re wondering why you would want that, well it’s because when you buy any generic laptop or desktop off the internet there’s a lot of work needed to ensure that it’s really well compatible with Linux. And when you buy from Tuxedo all that work is not necessary because you know that the hardware supports Linux. You can just slap any distro on it and it’s going to run well. And if there are a few things that need to be tweaked, Tuxedo has PPAs and repos that you can add to the distro to support the various small knickknacks that might not work out of the box yet. Tuxedo has a huge range of devices from Ultrabooks, NUCs, giant gaming towers or gaming laptops or workstations, you name it. They have something for each price point and each need. And they have tons of customization options, not only for the specs, but also you can have your own custom keyboard layout that they’re going to etch on the keys with a laser, or you can have your own logo on the lid of your laptop. So if you need a new device and you want to make sure that it runs Linux, don’t go and buy any old ThinkPad of the internet. Just get to the link in the description below and buy a device from Tuxedo. They’re really good. (https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en&v=t_vmXq_TbQ4)

Support the channel

So thanks everyone for watching the video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, don’t hesitate to like, to subscribe, to turn on notifications, or to write a comment. And if you didn’t like it, there’s a dislike button as well that you can restore with the dislike button extension. And if you want to help support the channel, there’s a dislike button as well that you can restore with the dislike button extension, and if you want to help support the channel there’s a PayPal link in the description a super thanks button underneath the video. There are links to my Patreon page and YouTube memberships and both of them get access to a weekly podcast on every Monday where I talk about Linux open source, how the channel is going and some personal stuff. And you also get to vote on the next topics that I’ll cover on the channel. So thanks everyone for watching, and I guess you’ll see me in the next one. Bye! Thank you. Bye.

He also wrote a blog post about alternative websites, why he left Odysee and why he has chosen Peertube. I'm leaving Odysee ⋅ The Linux Experiment
On the desktop, most things can be handled via extensions or RSS downloads, but there are a few front-ends worth mentioning:

You keep mentioning “Grayjay”…

https://grayjay.app/

Grayjay is your one stop shop for everything mentioned so far, in one convenient client. It’s built with the ideals of supporting creators directly, and moving past ads and tracking. You can even import account data, to use offline and stay private, or log in to comment and edit playlists on the regular account. It supports pretty much all video platforms, via plugins.

[Transcripts in the comments]

For creators:

Louis gets daily comments on youtube asking him to upload his videos to Odysee. Louis has an Odysee channel with over 30 000 subscribers. Those commenters either have an ulterior motive to shill the website, or they simply don’t use it. It’s hard to push viewers from the website with all the creators, to the niche one with 0.001% of the content. As shown in part 2 , Grayjay works together with the optional https://harbor.social/ sovereign identity thingy to deliver an identity separated from the hosting platforms, so you can follow a person, and if they get banned off Twitch or something, you can keep seeing their stuff in the same feed as your normal yt subscriptions.

Even if you don’t care about any alternative platform stuff, you should still know about Grayjay so you can OPT OUT if you disagree with any of this.

extras

If you're in a playlist, just remember to refresh every now and then

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Transcript, maybe you just want to skim through the points you care about instead of sitting there and watching, idk. More links

https://web.archive.org/web/20231018015131/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DePDzfyWkw

Intro - The monopoly/duopoly problem

Hey everybody, how’s it going? I hope you’re having a lovely day. Today I would like to talk about what is, in my opinion, a better way of viewing online video. There are two major problems right now with online video. I think most of my audience would agree. The first problem is that two platforms control 99% of what it is that you watch online. Twitch and YouTube. Most of what you watch, most of what anybody here is watching is coming from these two platforms. And it is very difficult to get people to switch. Switching requires using a different application. Who wants to try another application? When you get the new application, the new application is only for that new platform, which means you’re limited to what’s on that platform. And that platform has 0.0001% of the content creators. So it’s going to be very niche stuff. You’re going to feel like you’re missing out on everything else that’s out there. And it’s going to cause people to say, screw it, I don’t want to use this niche new platform. and they go back to the main one.

The centralized identity problem - sovereign identity is a MUST

The second problem that I see with online video today is that you’re not subscribing to me. You’re not subscribing to Louis Rossmann. You’re not subscribing to Eli the Computer Guy. You’re not subscribing to Dave Jones at EEVBlog. You are subscribing to Dave Jones on YouTube. You’re subscribing to Uncivil Law on Twitch. You’re subscribing to Destiny on YouTube. You’re subscribing to me on YouTube. I don’t own my identity on any of these platforms.

This matters when platforms destroy people’s life’s work over nothing - destiny, Eli the computer Guy, 3dprintgeneral deletions

And this is a serious issue because these platforms are, let’s be real here, they’ve deleted people for very silly reasons. Destiny has had a Twitch channel for over 10 years until he didn’t. Eli the Computer Guy had a channel for over 10 years. Eli has literally had his channel removed while streaming without ever being told why. And he had a community strike for hate speech for, I’m not kidding, saying a networking term with a lisp. He requested an appeal. And when they appealed his strike, the person who reviewed the strike was reading the transcript that’s created by the automatic YouTube captions. It read their misinterpretation of what he said because he said it with a lisp. He has a lisp. And then they upheld the strike. They didn’t even listen to the video. You could have your identity on this platform for 13 or 14 years and still be deleted at the press of a button because you don’t own your identity. Somebody else owns your identity.

Why is this video sponsored? Am I a shill?

And I’d like to talk about an application that we’ve come out with that really tries to solve these two problems. Now, when I marked this video as a sponsored video, I want to be very clear with something. I marked it as sponsored because I’m a paid employee of the company that created this application. But that is very different from a typical YouTube sponsorship. This is not a sponsored video like some garbage where I get emailed this letter saying, we’ll send you free stuff in exchange for a good review. No, this is not what this is at all. This is an application that I very much so was in charge of storyboarding, planning. I personally handpicked and hired the developers and I’ve been working with them every step of the way at this company as a full-time job. So let’s talk a little bit about this application and what it does.

How did we solve this problem 20 years ago?

Some of you who are as old as me may remember back in the day when you had AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, MSN, IRC, all these different ways to communicate with people. And you had to install all these different annoying applications. And most people didn’t want to install like 20 different Instant Messenger applications. So most people were just using AOL. Then tools like Pidgin and Trillion and Gaim came out that support virtually every single instant messaging platform within one application. And that is what we are going for with this application.

Introducing Grayjay, our video application

Enter Grayjay. Grayjay is a video application that we want to be better than the stock application for any one of these platforms. Grayjay is an application that has an open plugin interface. So here you can see that I have YouTube, Odysee, and Twitch enabled.

We support every major video platform

But if I wanted, I could add PeerTube, Kick, Rumble, Patreon, SoundCloud, and Nebula. And further, this is an open platform. We encourage you, if we are missing a platform here, to use our system to create your own plugin for the application for whatever platforms that we are missing. What this allows me to do is this allows me to have a creators tab where I have different creators on different platforms. So I can have Destiny on Odyssey, Eli the Computer Guy on YouTube, Mental Outlaw on Odysee, Daily Blob on YouTube. And if I wanted to, I could even search for a Twitch streamer because I have the Twitch plugin enabled. I can search for him and I can click subscribe. I can click on here and I can now see his content. But more importantly, my subscription feed now is one feed between all of my different platforms. And the idea here is to make the application better than the application would be with the stock app.

It does the thing :slight_smile:

So one thing you may notice when I decide to click on a video here is that it starts to play immediately, or at least as immediately as Spectrum Internet will allow when you live in the middle of nowhere, and it just plays immediately. You may notice something that’s missing in the beginning of the video that can be kind of aggravating on the stock app.

It has a download button!

You will notice that you have a download button here. This is an honest to God download button. And unlike modern download buttons that we discussed in this video, this download button actually works. It does what you would expect it to do.

You can use video platform playlists, or anonymous local playlists

You can create playlists in the app. I can have the playlist local and I can back it up locally so that the platform doesn’t get to see what my watch history is and doesn’t really get to track me in the way that they would if I logged in. The choice there is in your hands. It’s up to you.

You can search EVERY platform from one application

When you’re using this application, you are not just searching one platform. You are searching every one of the platforms that you clicked in a staggered way. So if I wanted to search for Motherboard Repair over here, I can search for Motherboard Repair and I can see results from Twitch, YouTube, Odyssey, Twitch, YouTube, Odyssey, all the different platforms that I have here. So I no longer feel like, because I’ve moved over to a new platform, that I’m pigeonholed into only watching what 0.0001% of the content creators that decided to try this new platform are creating. I still get to play in the main sandbox while understanding that new sandboxes exist.

We want to emphasize creators over platforms

The point here is to emphasize the creator, not the platform. We don’t want people to be watching Destiny on YouTube or Destiny on Twitch or Eli the Computer Guy on Kick. We want people to be watching the creator and subscribing to the creator.

Introducing Harbor, our sovereign identity application

This is an application called Harbor, because remember, we’re talking about identity here. Harbor is an application that allows me to confirm that I am me. It is also an application that can be used to confirm, let’s say, that a whistleblower actually works at a particular company. It is simply a way for people to be able to confirm claims about other people. So what I do with this application is I make a claim to my YouTube channel. I add something to my YouTube channel description. And what it does at that point is it says that I own this YouTube channel. This will mean that when you subscribe to Louis Rossmann, you have subscribed to me with a sovereign identity system. Nobody owns this identity. And if you want to know more about how this works, I will leave links down below where you can read and learn about the technical aspects of it. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLoCtRzTkJQ)

You should be subscribing to CREATORS, not platforms

The TLDR here is we want to create a system where you are not subscribing to somebody on a platform. You are simply subscribing to the person so that if they are deleted from that platform, there is still a place that you can go to find them. You could see what it is they’re posting. You could see what it is they’re doing. You can see the links to their donation page or their personal website if that’s what they want you to see, or the links to their merchandise that you can buy. We want you to be patronizing the creators directly without necessarily relying on the middleman of a platform.

Aspirational functionality for the future

And at some point, we’d like this application to be able to export video to a DHT so that you’re not dependent on a platform anymore that can remove somebody willy-nilly if they don’t like what they had to like this application to be able to export video to a DHT so that you’re not dependent on a platform anymore that can remove somebody willy-nilly if they don’t like what they had to say. Or they can remove somebody because they have a lisp when they’re talking about TCP IP, which seriously happened with Eli the Computer Guy.

Comments sections

This is another problem that we talk about a lot here, which is the comment section. Now, I understand we need some level of censorship in comment sections. We can’t just have comment sections that are completely unmoderated because they turn into a spam pile of shit. The problem we’re in right now is that it has gone too far in the other direction. When I am having a conversation with one of my audience members and I do not curse, I do not insult them, I do not say anything mean, that comment gets deleted. My comments that I make in my comment section on my own channel are not showing up for certain users. It’ll show up for me once, but it won’t show up for me later. I will be logged in and I will see my comment. I will log out and I will not see my comment on my own channel. This has gone too far. It’s gone a little crazy here. So we would like to have a way for you to be able to view the platform comments. But simultaneously, if you don’t want to view the platform comments, you can view off-platform comments. This is very important because, again, it takes the power away from the platform and puts it back in the users of the platform and the creators to be able to communicate with their audience.

This is open source, but it is NOT free!

Now, this is not a free application. This is an open-source application (VideoStreaming / Grayjay · GitLab), and we are going to talk about how that works over here. This is an open-source application because we here at Fudo believe that you need to understand what your computer is doing. Any application that we make, you need to be able to review the source code of. If you don’t know what your computer is doing, your computer is controlling you, not the other way around. But this is not a free application. We do want people to pay for it and we want to create an ecosystem where people feel comfortable paying for open source software. We’re not calling it a donation, we’re calling it a purchase.

How to buy the application

So here’s how this is going to work. When you go into the menu, there will be a buy button and you will be able to buy it. If you’re already paid, you click here and you enter your license key.

No DRM, infinite free trial period

If you don’t buy the application, it’s still going to work. And again, being an open source application, somebody could literally just edit out the code for the payment or just make it think it already paid.

We want to show we respect our users - NO DRM, NO ADS!

We’re really not trying to DRM this here. We’re trying to treat our users like adults. We’re not trying to be Sony with rootkits. We’re not trying to put anti-piracy measures into our own software. We do believe that the software has to be open source. You need to know what your computer is doing.

What happens if you don’t buy it? What’s our DRM/anti-piracy measure?

You need to feel like you’re in control of your computer, which means that you could literally edit the source code of the application to remove the part that asks you to pay, or edit it in a manner where it thinks that you already paid.

There are no DRM or anti-piracy measure

Again, you can do that, and that is between you and your God.

Our business model - you are the customer, not the product

We’re not going to be putting anti-piracy or tracking measures into the software, but we are seriously trying to change the ecosystem behind open source software. And more importantly, we’re trying to change this whole concept that you are the product to begin with. We do not believe that you are the product. At Futo, we believe that you are the customer. We are not trying to sell you to a data broker. We are not trying to sell you to an advertiser. We don’t wanna have an environment where if you’re talking with your friend about boxing gloves for 40 minutes, you go on your phone and you then start seeing ads for boxing gloves everywhere. That is not the future that we want. In order for us to have that future, you need to be the customer, not the product. And in order for you to be the customer, you have to pay for the software. That is the environment that we wanna create going into the future. That’s the relationship that we wanna have with our customers, and that’s the relationship that we are going to try to establish with you. If you find our software valuable, if we’ve created something that you find valuable, we’re asking you to pay for it.

If you think our software sucks, tell us why - grayjay@futo.org

And if you find that it’s not valuable in any way shape or form, then we’re asking that you use this little contact link that you’ll find inside the menu over here. We do have a way in the settings for you to submit feedback, so we are very much so interested in feedback on the application. If you are using it, please do consider clicking Submit Feedback and sending us an email with your thoughts on the application, and do consider giving it a try.

Why the non-standard license?

This is an open-source application, but it is not using a permissive license as most open-source applications.

The problem with the standard license

We have noticed a problem here when it comes to… Oh my god, NewPipe. So remember when I did a video on my live channel suggesting people download NewPipe? So many of you got so mad at me, because what you did was you went to the Play Store and you downloaded a malware-ridden pile of crap that was called Newpipe that looked like Newpipe, the actual open source media player, which is a great client, and you were filled with ads and all sorts of nasty crap, and some of them were asking you to pay for it. So what people were doing was they were taking Newpipe, they were forking it, they were filling it with ads, they were filling it with trackers, and then they were asking for money on the Play Store. This is bad. We don’t want to be in that situation. We want to be able to say if somebody forks our application and attempts to make money from it by deceiving users, we wish to reserve the right to tell them to go efF themselves. We don’t want this application tracking people. We don’t want this application having ads in it. We are very, very committed to not having a business model where the user is the product. We do not believe in that here. And we will aggressively pursue anybody that attempts to pervert our software in that way, which is why we don’t have the most permissive license.

Let me be clear on our intentions with this license

It’s very important to be clear on this point. So important that I even changed my shirt. If you download this application and you decide that you want to modify the source code so you can run a build that’s a little bit more amenable to your use case on your phone, we have no problem with that. However, if you modify the source code of this application to insert advertisements, trackers, or malware in it, and then try to redistribute our application with malware ads or trackers in it in a deceptive way, we will come after you. That is why we have a license that is not as permissive as NewPipe’s license, because technically, the people who were taking part in that scam did nothing that was illegal. And in our case, if you make our application worse by inserting malware or trackers or spyware or ads into it, we want the ability to come after you and take that application down because a FUTO application should never have ads, trackers, spyware, malware, or DRM in it. Ever. And if we see our application being distributed with malware, spyware, ads, trackers, or any of this junk, we will make sure that it is no longer being distributed. But if you want to modify the source code for your own personal use, go crazy. We don’t really care.

The software’s full functionality works without paying, but we ask you to pay if you find it valuable

At the end of the day, this is a piece of software that again, you could literally download and you can use without paying virtually in perpetuity. But we’re asking you to pay if you find it valuable. We would like to have this Harbor application that I’ve talked about set up in a way where a creator who signs up with Harbor will be implemented in the app where it is very easy for them to communicate with their audience, what their donation links are, what their merchandise is.

We want to see viewers supporting creators directly - because ad supported media sucks

We want users patronizing content creators. We do not want to see a world that is only ad supported, because we’ve been seeing that world for the past 15 years. And I’ll be honest with you, it kind of sucks. It results in the most sensationalist bullshit content always rising to the top. And it results in a system where if Coca-Cola says, I don’t like this, 10 years of somebody’s life just kind of goes down the drain. And that’s just, it’s in my opinion, a crap system. (Coca cola is merely being used here as a catch-all term for “bland advertiser selling lame pop culture product that demands any and all ads appear on lukewarm, boring-ass content”, I do not know if coca cola has or does not have a have a positive view of destiny or eli the computer guy, but hopefully you get the point. ty.) We want to see users patronizing content creators directly. And we want to see them patronizing content creators in a privacy respecting way that is not annoying. This application is designed to try to make the use of every one of these platforms here easier or better than it is with the stock application. It is open source. It is paid, but literally will work if you don’t pay. We are really trying to push the ball forward here in a way that is respectful of both the content creators and the audience members who are asking to take an interest in this application.

More future plans & vision

And if I’m being completely honest with you, this application as it currently stands is really just in phase one of a multi-phase process of trying to give control back to consumers as well as the content creators over the content that they produce. Again, we would love to have a system once Harbor is fully developed for you to simply just click a button and take that content creator’s content and export it to a decentralized database somewhere where if that person’s all their videos get deleted from YouTube, Odyssey, Rumble, and everything else, they’re still available for everybody to be able to watch. That’s something that is on our roadmap. If that content creator is deleted from Odysee, YouTube, and Twitch, we want there to be a system where all of their videos still show up in your feed, and you continue to watch them as if nothing ever happened. We want the content creators to feel like they own their identity. But more importantly, we want content creators to feel like they can have a direct connection to their audience, to communicate with their audience, and also to request that their audience pay them for their content. We believe that the audience should be paying for the content, not Coca-Cola. Because here’s the thing, when Coca-Cola decides they don’t like somebody, 13 years of their work goes down the tubes. That’s a waste. Let me know what you think in the comments down below.

Link to a more detailed technical presentation

Lastly, if you’d like to hear a more technical presentation on how this application works from the two developers that I’m happy, humbled, and honored to have had the opportunity to hire last year, please do check them out at this YouTube video that I will link down below on the Fudo YouTube channel. That’s it for today, and as always, I hope you learned something. I’ll see you all in the next video. Bye now. down below on the Futo YouTube channel. That’s it for today. And as always, I hope you learned something. I’ll see you all in the next video. Bye now.

GRAYJAY - A New FUTO Video App - Koen Jeukendrup and Kelvin Keultjes Present - YouTube

https://web.archive.org/web/20230802165347/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jyRhiP2Oso&list=TLPQMDIwODIwMjOOYL3TFUryfw&index=4

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Text, links, you know how this goes by now

Introduction - The identity issue

Hey everybody, how’s it going? I hope you’re having a lovely Saturday morning. A few days ago, I did a video on a new way to view videos online. In that video, I went over some of the problems that we have with modern content platforms and how we consume content on them. Some of the biggest problems that I mentioned in that video that I didn’t really dig into in great detail is the sovereign identity system that we’d like to have here to give creators back control over their identity on these platforms. Right now, you don’t subscribe to Louis Rossmann. You subscribe to Louis Rossmann on YouTube, Louis Rossmann on Twitch, Louis Rossmann on Patreon, Odysee, Rumble, and so on and so forth.

Who owns your identity?

Another platform owns my identity, and if they decide that I should no longer have an identity, I no longer have an identity. In spite of 10 to 12 years of work, my content can be stripped from the platform if an AI somewhere farts and decides that my cat is hate speech, which again has literally happened. This is Mr. Clinton. Look at him. Look at him.

How does this negatively affect creators?

In all seriousness, people have had their channels deleted for content that YouTube previously manually reviewed and said was okay to monetize. And we also have political creators like Destiny who have been hailed by the New York Times as great de-radicalizers that have brought people back to normal, sane points of view that just a few years later were deleted in spite of 10 plus years of work contributing to these types of conversations online.

You would be pissed if this happened to you

Whether or not you like these creators or think that they are great, I don’t care. What matters and what I think we can all agree on is that you would be pissed if it happened to you or a creator that you like and watch. And if you’re not offended when it happens to somebody that you don’t like, you bet your ass nobody’s going to be there to defend you when it happens to somebody you do like. Or, dare I say it, when it happens to you. And we are trying to come up with solutions to these problems.

You would be pissed if this happened to you

So today I’d like to demonstrate how this sovereign identity feature works, and I’d like to answer some of the common questions that we’ve received. I’m going to use myself as an example. I’m going to open up the Grayjay application, and I’m going to search for myself here. And when I search for myself, you will see Louis Rossmann and I show up normally, and I have a little support page over here that is unpopulated. So now what I’m going to do is I’m going to open the Harbor app, which I will include a link to down below, as well as a link to a video that describes how this works in greater technical detail (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLoCtRzTkJQ). Then I will be able to tell you as a man who can’t even figure out how to make word wrap in C.

Verifying my YouTube channel

In all seriousness here we are going to go to new profile and I am going to make my profile name at Rossmann group and hit enter and I’m gonna create profile then I am going to sign into my identity and I’m going to click make a identity and I’m going to click make a claim. And I’m going to go over to YouTube. I’m going to put my account link over here to my YouTube channel, which I’m going to probably type a little funkily since I haven’t had breakfast yet today. I have not had an appetite recently for a number of reasons. And this is going to spell my name right. There we go. Spell my name right. Next step. Now, once I give it my YouTube URL, it is going to give me a code. And what I’m going to do is I’m going to message that code to myself so that I can put it into my YouTube profile. The YouTube Studio app doesn’t actually give me a way to do that on Android. Could, God forbid, the YouTube Studio app actually be useful. You can’t even copy and paste comments from that thing. And you can’t see comments past five or six comments in the Android, the Android app for YouTube Studio is absolutely horrific. But anyway, that is a topic for another video. So I’m going to go over to this page, and I’m going to edit my profile to include this. Once you’ve done this, you will have to wait about two to four minutes for it to actually show up and propagate properly. So we’re going to do that now. wait about two to four minutes for it to actually show up and propagate properly. So we’re going to do that now. If you are impatient, you are going to see this on your screen, verification failed. But I assure you, if you are patient and you wait, it will eventually show up. Just give it two or four minutes. What I’m going to do because I’m impatient is I’m just going to sit here and click retry verification over and over and over again. And there we go. It works. If I have any regard for my audience, I will have edited out the two minutes of me humming the Tune of Jeopardy out of pitch and out of tune. Now I have made a claim to my YouTube channel.

Verifying my Odysee channel

I can also make a claim to my Odyssey channel over here. So I’m going to enter the link to my Odyssey channel. There we go. I Believe my YouTube channel link is this Me my Odyssey channel link is gonna be this So I do this Next step It’s going to give me that same code. I am going to take that code, and I’m going to copy it in over here. So I go to my page, I go about, I hit edit on Odyssey, and I hit save. After submitting, it will take a few minutes, and it does take longer on Odyssey than it does on YouTube. I think that their budget for a server room is slightly less than Google’s. And again, for your listening pleasure, I will edit out me humming the tune to Jeopardy as I wait for verification to complete. And we’re there. So now I click continue. Now for about, I’m just going to put a description here. I’m Louis Anthony Rossmann. For better or for worse. And I can even set an avatar. So I can set a picture of me. Okay, and I will set a picture of me to be an angry Blackberry kitten after I’ve taken her to the vet. Here we go.

Adding my support link for creator monetization

Now over here, there’s a link to set store, and this is going to set what we put on the support page. I’m going to put here is a link to a payment and donation page that I have that also allows people to leave me a message. bit.ly slash post a message. Okay, so what I’m going to do now is I’m going to go back to creators. I have nothing here because I’ve just installed the application from scratch.

How it shows up in the feed

I’m going to search for myself, and I hit subscribe. And what you’ll see is that I have that weird little blue circly thingamajiggy next to Rossmann Group over there. So if I were to subscribe to somebody else who is not using this sovereign identity system, like this, I just go here. I go to create creators go there search John Deloney I subscribe to him when I go to subscriptions and I’m listed I have my subscriptions and my creators listed you’ll see that I have that little blue thingy that indicates that I am using harbor the sovereign identity system and he does not

Data deduplication

so if I were to add a source like Odyssey here, let me just enable that, I can search for Louis Rossmann as well, and one thing you’ll notice is if I go and I subscribe to myself on Odyssey, I also have that little thingamajig over there, and when I go to subscriptions, it’s going to automatically deduplicate my content. So if I click here and I go videos, it’s deduplicating my content. Prior to doing this, I would have seen my videos twice when I searched for myself. Now I’m only seeing myself once. My video is not showing up twice because I posted to Odyssey and YouTube. The second thing you’ll notice is if I get deleted from one of these platforms, I’m going to stay in your feed because you are now not subscribed to me on YouTube. You have not subscribed to me on Odyssey. You have subscribed to me, which means that when you click over here subscribed to me on YouTube. You have not subscribed to me on Odyssey. You have subscribed to me, which means that when you click over here and you click onto my name, you have subscribed to me directly.

UI/UX for creator monetization is at the core of what we’re doing

So there is gonna be a support button and a store button. And when you click on the store button here, it’s going to take you to the page that I have linked. The user interface and user experience here is designed to make it as easy as humanly possible and more importantly, as obvious as humanly possible that we want you to patronize and support the content creators directly on their own website, using their own payment system, using their own store, completely independent of anything that we are doing. We don’t want to be the ones that are making the payment system. We don’t want to be taking a cut of the payment. We want you to patronize that content creator directly, and we want you to be doing that in an application with a user interface and user experience that makes it as obvious as humanly possible and as easy as humanly possible to demonstrate that that is our goal this application and this system is designed from the ground up to accomplish two things a in a very user experience and user interface friendly way make it clear how a viewer can support the creator, allow the creator to specify the method by which they wish to be supported. An online store, their own personal website, their own PayPal donation link, Zelle, Bitcoin, mailing a check to a PO box in Berwick, Maine, whatever it is that you want, and we are not going to be getting involved or in the middle of any of that.

Protecting creator identity

The second thing that this entire system seeks to accomplish is it allows you to have control over your identity. Your viewers are not subscribing to you on a platform. They are subscribing to you. You own your identity, not the platform. So when a platform decides that 10 years of work de-radicalizing people that has been recognized and held by the New York Times is no longer worth it, that your identity is not deleted. Or if some stupid AI decides that your cat is hate speech, for whatever reason, you don’t have to worry about losing what you have worked for for 10 years, your entire audience and your connection to them. If they decide that content that you have created in the past that has been monetized in the past, that has been manually reviewed and okay to be monetized in the past, magically no longer complies with their own rules and now everything you’ve ever done has to be deleted, that you still have an identity. That is what we’re working towards here. That is what we want to have accomplished with this application. And we are also going to be adding functionality as we go.

This is a work in progress - we WILL make mistakes

To be 100% clear here, this is a work in progress. This application is under construction, and this is uncharted territory. I don’t see other people trying to do this. And as a result, we’re probably going to make mistakes. I’m going to screw things up. The company that I work for that is creating this application is going to screw things up. The developers that I’ve hired to work on this application may screw things up. And what I’m going to ask from for all of you is to be honest about where we screw things up. And more importantly, to be a little bit patient with us as we move along, we are going to be taking as much user input as as humanly possible.

OPT OUT FUNCTIONALITY for creators who do NOT want their content viewable in this app

There are people that people that have asked listen i don’t want to be in this application can i opt out of this yes you will be able to on our roadmap is an opt out feature so that if you do not want your content visible in this application that you can verify your channel and once you’ve verified your channel you can opt out so that when a viewer searches for your channel or searches for your content within the grayjay application they will not find it if you have opted out. This is functionality that, to my knowledge, does not exist in any of these other third-party clients like NewPipe or Vanced or invidious or any of these other types of front ends, but it will exist in ours because we want to put power in the hands of the creators, both to own their identity and also be able to say, hey, listen, I don’t want to be a part of this at all. Leave me out of this. That is in the works. But above all, we want to see users directly patronizing the creators. We want the audience to have a direct line to the content creators that they enjoy viewing content from, and we want to make it as easy as possible for viewers to compensate content creators for creating content that is of value. As I said, we are trying to fix the problems as we currently see them. And I realize that there are not a lot of people out there that are willing to put their neck out and try and fix these problems because they’re difficult problems to solve. I’m not going to have all the answers. The company that I work for is not going to have all the answers. We’re really figuring this out as we go.

Our mission

And as we figure things out as we go, we want to do everything that we can to make it better for both the viewers and the content creators to view the content that they want to view without being blocked from it to be able to continue to own their identity without having to worry about a platform deleting it and to be able to be compensated for the content that they produce we want people directly patronizing content creators and paying creators that they believe produce genuine value for them this is the world that we dream of perhaps it’s a little bit idealistic but it’s the world that we’re working towards we may fail and stumble along the way, but we’re trying.

Harbor’s utility for whistleblowers

Another thing to mention here is that this application goes so far beyond simply allowing YouTube or Twitch creators to continue to connect to their audience at the point that Google or Amazon think that they should be unpersoned. This application is also an excellent way to verify a whistleblower. When you go here, there is the button vouch for claim and make a new claim. And on here, you have much more than simple social media platforms. You have Occupation, Skill, Freeform. Let’s say that I worked at Apple Inc. and I was a customer service manager. I know, bizarro work. Let’s say I’m a customer service manager at Apple Inc. and I verify my identity on here and enough people vouch for my identity when I click Vouch for a Claim. If there is somebody else out there who works at Apple, they could say that they’re a whistleblower within the customer service department. They may not want to give away their name after talking to the New York Times and Bloomberg News and Fox 5 because they don’t want to get fired, but they make their claim annonimously, and if I wanted to bolster that person’s claim their claim I, as a verified customer service manager at Apple could go over to them and verify their claim that you work in the customer service department at Apple. Now, at that point, you would have to believe me enough, you would have to trust me enough to believe that this is true. But you could see all of the people that vouch for this claim in order to make an informed decision yourself as to whether or not you believe this particular whistleblower. There are a number of ways for this application to be used that are just go very far outside verifying YouTube and Twitch and Odysee. This is about everybody owning their identity, and I look forward to seeing the many different and creative ways this is used to verify people who are whistleblowers who speak out against injustice.

Losing is acceptable - doing nothing is not

Lastly, to end the video, I’d like to answer a question that has been showing up very often and was one of the most upvoted comments in the last video that I did. Louis, do you think there’s a chance that maybe, you know, Google doesn’t exactly share your vision for a sovereign identity world where the creator and the viewer have a little bit more control over these things? It’s possible. And yes, I realize that some people may see this as poking the bear. Why am I doing this, if that is the case? Are you afraid of losing your channel? Are you afraid of losing any of these things? Yeah, it is kind of a concern. Again, you know, one of the reasons that people find my for-profit business, which is where I actually make my living, umm not from this channel, from number one ranking on YouTube for MacBook Logic Port Repair after I’ve done thousands of videos on it. When you search for MacBook Logic Port Repair on Google, I’m usually one of the first or second results that shows up. If you search MacBook repair locally on the Maps platform, which Google also dominates, I show up here. Again, most of my business is coming from the fact that my reviews, my search engine optimization, my videos, my reputation is mostly on Google. Yes, there is the obvious concern of what happens when they don’t particularly see eye to eye with my vision on online video distribution. It’s a concern. It really is. And at the end of the day, what matters to me as I age and as I’m, you know, as I get into my mid-30s is being able to honestly answer the question of whether or not I actually stood for something. You know, one of the things that I went over in a recent video that I did is that I genuinely feel like for the past 15 years, when it comes to the repair industry, that I have failed. If I’m just looking at it from an objective point of view, over the past 15 years, my entire goal has been to make it easier for people to get into this profession, whether by creating free educational materials, or in the words of Eli the Computer Guy, gatekeeper-less, authority-less, free education, so that people can learn how to get into our craft, or advocating at the legislative level for people to be able to get into our craft by getting rid of manufacturer blocks, independence, being able to repair devices. Let’s be real here, I failed. It’s literally harder to get into the industry now than it was 15 years ago. And it sure as shit ain’t because there’s no demand for these services. There’s more demand for it now than ever. And there’s also less availability of parts, manuals, schematics, diagrams, chips than there ever was. The reason that I can live with 15 straight years of failure is because I know every step of the way that I stood for something, that I was willing and open to put my neck out for what I believed in. And when I see people that I’ve watched over the years have their channels deleted over nothing, when I see people who I’ve spent 10 years watching who have been personal and business mentors to me say out loud, “I have given up on this platform because I have received strikes for things I did not do wrong, because I have had my channel deleted in the middle of a live stream and they can’t even tell me the reason for it. So I am no longer taking this seriously.” That bothers me. That aggravates me. And I would like to do something about it. And again, if I fail in every one of my pursuits, if I fail to the point of no longer having an identity myself, if I fail to the point that my for-profit business is no longer viable because it was built on a structure of a good search engine ranking at Google and off of the goodwill of the thousand free board repair videos I made on this channel, I’ll be able to live with that as long as I can say that I stood for something. I’ll always be able to live with failure. What I can’t live with is knowing that the world had the potential to be better, knowing that I had an opportunity to make it better, and that I did nothing. That’s what matters to me at this point in my life. We’ll see how it works out. That’s it for today. And as always, I hope you learned something. I’ll see you all in the next video. Bye now.

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Internet Archive slow link https://web.archive.org/web/20230902063159/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jyRhiP2Oso

Transcript for that technical talk Louis mentioned, " GRAYJAY - A New FUTO Video App - Koen Jeukendrup and Kelvin Keultjes Present"

https://web.archive.org/web/20230902063159/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jyRhiP2Oso

Louis Intro

Alright, we’re going to be getting ready for our next set of presenters over here. So as I said before, let’s say that that gentleman did actually get banned when he said, I’m warming to Django as a result of getting a climate change warning on his video after saying I’m warming to Django and he wanted to go to another platform. The problem with every one of these other platforms is admittedly at the end of the day you’re yelling into the void with 40 people. As one of these comedians said at one of the last Minds.com events, you managed to get all of your users into a room together very good. And one of the problems here is that it’s very difficult to get people to switch to using a different platform. So what if you were able to make it so that the people using YouTube actually got a better experience using a different application that just so happened to feature these other platforms so that you could get people to slowly start getting used to finding information in videos and podcasts and other sources while simultaneously not taking them away from their drug of choice. Which brings us to our next project. I’ll introduce Kelvin and Cone. They are programmers here for our in-house project called Grayay.

Why?

Testing this Hello, my name is Cohen I’m going to be talking about Grayjay our Futo Media app so it’s effectively an app meant for consuming media content. It’s for on-device playing but also streaming to a big screen. So for example, you can stream it to your TV. So why are we doing this? All our competitors, basically YouTube, Odyssey, Rumble, they all allow you to upload your video. But as soon as you do, you kind of lose your ownership because you have an account on their platform, but if you end up getting banned, you lose your audience. And the FUTO mission is to create infrastructure for self-publishing and to retain ownership after you’ve published. So what we want to do is we want to give creators the power to directly monetize their content, and we want to give users the power to decide what they want to watch.

First steps

This is, we have an easier job in that sense because we’re not exploiting the users, job in that sense because we’re not exploiting the users. So we have an easier time making an app that they actually want to use. We’re not trying to keep them on the platform as long as possible to make them watch ads. We’re just trying to give them a good experience. In this sense, the content sources are going to be the key to success, like Louis said before. It’s going to be difficult to get people to use this app if they can’t watch what they want to watch. So, let’s have a look at the sources UI.

Manage sources

So, as you can see here, the sources are all selectable and enableable. So for example, in this case, we have YouTube and Odyssey enabled. And we can also enable Rumble. Additional sources can be also installed. These are JavaScript plugins. There will be more on this later. So you could, for example, scan a QR code or click a link that starts with VFudo and the app will open with this window and you will see information about the plugin like the version, who made it, there will also be some cryptographic information to make sure that nobody is doing any funny business. Also, the permissions that this has. So for example, if your JavaScript plugin can use certain things, then it will show up on the permissions. If there is any errors, for example, here, then you can see the missing signature warning. If we click Install, the Rumble plugin will show up. And once it’s configured, we have several options here. You can, for example, log in to get platform-specific recommendations if you so want to. For example, some people really like the YouTube recommendations. They can have them if they want at the cost of some privacy. the YouTube recommendations, they can have them if they want at the cost of some privacy. There’s also for the migration pass, you have the importing of playlists and subscriptions. And you can update your plug-in here. So let’s go and interact with these sources. We go back to our home screen. And we click the search button. So here you can see we have suggestions. These will be provided by the source which you give the most priority and when we click the submit button we can see that we have a search which combines all of the different sources into a single feed.

Video playback

So if we click a video for example, you can see here the video view and also the comments. The comments will be two tabs in the future. Right now it’s just the platform specific comments, but in the future there will be also the option to have comments on Polycentric. Polycentric will also be the only way to make comments because we think it would be good if everyone has control over their digital identity rather than leaving it at some big tech company. Videos can also be downloaded for offline viewing, which is a very nice feature to have.

Channels

So let’s have a look at channels. So in this case, you see that we are at a channel. You also have some monetization options. So store, donate, about, maybe in the future there will be memberships. Fudo isn’t interested in playing any kind of middleman role. We just provide links to whatever you prefer using. So if you have a store already, you can just add information here. And this is all managed via Neopass, which was the previous presentation.

Feeds

Yeah, so if we go back to the feeds, we will have two different feeds. So we have the home feed, which is based on recommendations. And we have the subscription feeds, which is just everything you’re subscribed to. This is personally one of my annoyances, is that whenever I go on YouTube, I just get served all kinds of stuff I don’t even want to watch and the stuff that I subscribe to, I can’t even find it. So we really want to make sure that you as a user have the feeling that you can find what you want to watch. A recommendation engine in the future, like Harpo also mentioned, will be something that you can customize and choose.

Playlist

Videos can also be added to playlists. So here you see a playlist, for example, just a very nice collection of video. You can also download the entire playlist in case you’re going on some kind of trip or whatever. This is the download manager. So you can see everything that’s stored. And when you are offline, you can just play any video that you have downloaded here.

Casting

We also have casting to a big screen. For this we have three protocols. Chromecast, Airplay, Fastcast. Chromecast by default is something that’s really locked down. Google effectively made it impossible to make your own receiver Unless Google authorizes it because they have some root level certificate nonsense going on Our app actually does work with custom Chromecast receivers, so if you’re in there if you want to build one It does work with our app AirPlay is also supported. Currently, it’s a bit limited because it doesn’t support Dash, will likely be resolved in the future. FastCast is something that we developed in-house at Fudo. There weren’t really any nice open source casting protocols where you could just pass a URL or a Dash manifest, and you had to do all kinds of reverse connection nonsense to get your dash served.

FastCast

The FastCast is effectively just an open source protocol that runs on any desktop. So if you, for example, have a Linux media server, you can still cast to it. So here’s an example of what that looked like. It can either be launched as a tray app or as a background service. And it just receives a URL and starts playing. So, we also have a lot of settings. So everyone likes a different experience. Some people really like the big video preview feed and some people really like a different feed style. You can really do anything you want. So I’m gonna hand it off to Kelvin, he’s gonna talk a bit more about the plugin system. Thank you.

Kelvin

Plugin System Goals

So I’m going to talk a bit about the plugin system. It’s more talk from engineers. So the main goal of the plugin system was to support as many platforms as we can, but also that we don’t have to make them all because their pop-up platforms all the time, we can make them all of them. So we wanted to do some workloads, we wanted to make, if there’s a breaking change in the platform, we want to be able to deploy very quick fixes to them, and of course, if we’re asked because sure we can make a YouTube plugin system, but if YouTube doesn’t like it, they can take it down, but they can’t stop all of us. Someone else can just make a plugin instead of us, if they want.

Challenges

So some main challenges, performance needs to be fast, it shouldn’t be slower than all the apps of course. Security, we try to limit looking at the most as we can. But of course it’s not always foolproof so you do need to just develop of course. Compatibility needs to be as widely compatible with any platform so we provide capabilities for that. It needs to be easy to make new plugins as easy as possible and it needs to be easy to fix existing plugins. So here’s what I think is what again looks like.

Plugin System Sources

So here’s what it’s actually a look like. It’s very simple. It’s factory three files, a configuration JSON, a script, a JavaScript, and an icon, that’s it, pretty much. And you can host those on any particular URLs, can you get them, can you get them, can you just be yourself hosted URL, anything HTTPS will work.

Config

So if you look at config, there are some interesting things here. So you see metadata, as you see the description, name, author, author URL. The ID is in fact an ID that’s unique, of course, among all the plugins. If you’re trying to copy someone else ID, and someone else has it already installed you’ll get some errors. So that also the script public key, this will be used to make sure it’s actually you that’s updating the plug-in, and not someone that managed to get access to your HTTP host. So if it’s not signed with the same key, it will also throw exceptions. We have packages which effectively specify the capabilities of a plugin. So for example, this plugin wants HTTP access. Makes sense. Allowed URLs, which effectively limits the domains the plugin has access to. This is again a security to make sure no strange requests are going out. And of course the version, which if you’re in command it, it updates. So example, Odyssey, again, HTTP package, allowed URLs, you see them, several Odyssey domains, and the entire Odyssey plugin is only 400 lines of code. So that’s pretty good, I think.

Plugin system Architecture

So, underneath it all, there is a V8 engine, as many of you probably know, it’s the same engine Chrome uses. It’s bare-bone, there is no internet access by default, there is no storage capability, it just base JavaScript and we provide any additional capabilities. For example, HTTP access, you have to include package and we provide the bindings. Let’s see, DOM parsing is another example, the fault of the DOM is built existing V8, so we provide the capability. So we define a JavaScript interface, so we provide a few functions that can be used and you implement those and we’ll call them. We can also, so at web client we have available for plugins, there are two per plugin, one for authenticated requests and one for non-auth requests. We try to use non-auth whenever we can, but for example, for importing your subscriptions we need to log-in, of course. We can’t get those anywhere else. So we can inject authentication into the web client so this, again, doesn’t necessarily have access to your credential directly. They have to go to the system. So that’s not a security method.

Installing a plugin

So here’s an example of installing screen. You see a link, you open it, you saw a little bit before, you install it, you get a security warning, you install it, and there, it appears. Pretty simple. Not much to it. We try to give the user as many warnings as possible where the error, we don’t want to limit developers, but we do want to warn the user if the developers are doing something funny. All right. Yes.

Plugin Development Requirements

So, to develop a plugin, you’ll need effectively two or three things. You need the FUTO app installed, so the Grayjay app installed, and you’ll need a computer that has a shared network on the same as your phone. And of course, a editor of your choice and file access to an HTTP share. This can be hosted on the computer itself, this can be remote, HTTP shared, there are many ways to do it really. You’re not going into much detail on this.

Getting started

So to get started, you effectively features enable you to help us in your app. That’s quite simple, you just tap the version like you would expect an Android, and you start the server. And now you can connect to your phone from the computer you already have. So what you do is you write some with the JSON, so the config file and JSON on your JavaScript on your HTTP share, and you enter those in the field there, the plugin config, JSON URL. And you see the past used plugins as well, so you can also click those, and you can still load them.

Portal Overview Tab

If you’re the right, you’ll see this view. It effectively shows you the plugin you’re effectively loaded. There are some options, you can download an autocomplete.js, which generates some autocomplete bindings for your IDE. You can reload the plugin, so if you make changes to your script or your config, you just click the reload button, it will reload everything, and you see the warnings as you would see if they would install it.

Portal Testing Tab

Then there’s a testing tab. This is where you’ll spend a lot of time. Here you can take individual methods that plug in over the app expects you to implement. And you can just load your script, edit the line, click the test button, and see the output.

In-Browser Testing

So the benefit of this is that you can very quickly, you change the line, click the reload button, click the test button, you get your output very quick. In less than two seconds you can do a iteration on your code. The methods are run in your browser, not on the app, which makes it faster to test yes, but it does have full access to the packages, so we actually remote all the calls to packages to the app so that you actually have realistic environments to work in. However, your browser does have more capabilities than in the app, so there are some compatibility things there, so it’s not identical but we try to keep it as compatible as possible.

Testing on device

But you can test it in app directly, so you don’t have to go to the installation process, you can actually do that within the browser as well. So when you go to the integration tab, there’s an inject plugin button, when you click it, it will upload the plugin to your phone, and you can actually just use the plugin as if you already installed it. And you see the logs that the plugin generates. So yeah, so yeah, you see the screen, you see the red icon which means that it’s a development plugin. It’s not persistent if you restart the app. It’s gone It doesn’t unlock all the games. It’s has no persistence. So you can just test it and yeah, you see here for example an error you see the error appearing in your browser and you see the code it tells an exception and you see that reflected in the other pictures. So here’s an effect you how you do it in practice So you enter your URL in this case. I’m just going to use the post URL you see the floats begin and go testing And you’ll see if I can test on hello here. So you see how it’ll just begin. I’m going for this thing. And you’ll see if I click Test on Hello, so you see all the methods that the plugin can implement right there. And you can click at home, you see an exception, because there’s an exception to go. So we coment it out. We click the reload button. And we test again. And there it goes. There’s our output, which is what we expected. And then we go to integration. And we can just inject plugin. And in fact, it’s now on your app that you are connected to. It will pop up. And you can use the home, for example, you’ll see. You see all the calls it does tand get results, home pager, etc, etc. And you see all the data and if there’s an exception, it will appear. So if I enable here the exception and I reload it, I can just inject again, it will update it all again. And if I now try the home page again on my app, you’ll see an exception. So that’s all nicely mirrored. And that way you can very quickly develop it again. And that’s in realistic environments without having to go to the entire installation process every time, which is too time-consuming to do it quickly. And I think that’s it. Yes. So any questions? you can install the app. Quite a disclaimer. It’s a very alpha build. It might have some stable code in there. And there’s some test code that subscribes you to Louis Rossmann. Not advertising, it’s purely accidental.

Will it be able to incorporate RSS feeds?

So, RSS feeds, you could, if the app would support displaying that, currently it expects you to return videos. So, we expect video URLs and video things to display in a certain format. But if we expanded the app, you could expand it to any level you need.

You can have different video channels and different sources as long as you support those APIs?

Yeah, for example, if you have different video platforms, so you can also new pets will try to pull those together as well. But yeah, that’s a different part.

Can you use TypeScript to develop plugins?

In theory you can because it’s just javascript, so just compile to javascript, it will work. But I think we’re going to recommend not doing that because it makes it harder to see and get inside into the plugins. And it shouldn’t be that hard to make the plugin where you need type script to do it. You can still get type suggestions though because we just support the autocomplete.js stuff. Other questions? Yes?

Do you have a webtorrent plugin yet?

Not yet. At the moment we have YouTube, Rumble, Odyssey. I think the next plan was PeerTube, PeerTube instances.

So you’re going on top of the platforms?

Yeah at the moment plugins are intended to implement a platform, anyone can, so anyone can develop a plugin and as long as they can put it in the format we want, anything works effectively. Other questions? I don’t see any hands. Thank you. you

5

I recently found out that if you disable and delete watch history in YouTube account settings, the algorithm turns off. The homepage stops working, and so do shorts, both on mobile and on desktop, resulting in subscriptions, playlist management and sidebar recommendations becoming the only viable ways of engaging with YouTube.

This comes with a kneecap of obviously not having a watch history, and with YouTube Premium playtime tracking gets disabled as well, but that’s a surefire way to disable the algorithm on all the available platforms, be it desktop, mobile, or TV. Massive improvement imo