Technology

Peertube is great. And while the lack of an app is a problem, the lack of having a way to make money out if your videos is a bigger one for creators.

For now, they have to rely on Patreon or an equivalent.

Greyjay

Grayjay is great IMO. It combines video from a variety of sources, such as YouTube, Odyssee, Rumble, PeerTube, Twitch, etc. I disable most of those, but I do have some channels on multiple platforms. Also, there's a feature to recognize the same content across services for the same creator, so users can choose the service they want the content from.

It's Android only, so hopefully they add more platforms eventually. One annoying thing is that it's not really open source, it's just "source available," but that's way better than the propriety platforms they're providing an alternative to. That said, there are a few things I don't like about it:

• rotate doesn't work reliably for me - I just got a new phone, so I'll see if it's still an issue
• seems like it uses way more resources than necessary (i.e. compared to NewPipe)
• kinda buggy sometimes - it is getting regular updates, so I think it's just growing pains

And some things I love about it:

• available outside of the Play Store - I get updates within the app, just like on a desktop app, or I can install through F-Droid (they have their own repo)
• PiP - I like having it open while wasting time on Lemmy
• no ads or other nonsense - you can buy a license, but features aren't gated behind paying (I'm planning to pay once rotate is fixed)

it also proxies the video and blocks trackers iirc, giving you some form of anonymity from Google

Just be careful actually using that international data for too long cause I used it when I took a semester abroad and they shut off my data and account access literally on the day of my flight back home and kept billing me for months after when I didn't have access to my account to cancel billing for my (non-)service. They say the majority of your service should be spent in the US but they don't actually define anywhere what that means to them. They just tell you one day that you're shit out of luck and not eligible for service anymore (including domestically).

None of their support people were able to help by turning my service back on long enough to get back to the states or even just telling me how to get back into good standing. The only thing they were able to tell me is why it was shut off.

Anyways if you do need international data, airalo was really reasonably priced and easy to set up. Came in clutch. Fuck google up the ass for leaving me stranded like that.