Android

Snapshot of comments in those posts. Mostly just governance drama.

From the new fork https://web.archive.org/web/20260107095954/https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/comments/1q1we4e/the_revanced_situation_is_crazy_a_new_project/

From ReVanced side

A major contributor submitted a big core change (fingerprint/patcher internals). Maintainers pushed back hard on design and maintainability. The contributor felt stonewalled, got personal, and eventually left. After leaving, they forked the project, copied large chunks of code, squashed commits, stripped contributor history, and allegedly violated GPLv3 rules by changing licensing and attribution. That’s the heart of the dispute.

From there, both sides started accusing each other of bad faith, harassment, threats, ego, gatekeeping, you name it. A small group rallied around the fork and started saying “ReVanced is dead” which… yeah, that’s the part that caused panic. -- AI generated summary of a 40~ pg document that someone from ReVance uploaded

Basically the contributor proposed a major redesign to the patcher’s fingerprint system that worked short term but papered over deeper limitations. The maintainers saw it as a band-aid approach that would lock in technical debt and cause long term maintenance problems, so after extensive review they rejected it and pushed for a more fundamental solution instead. The contributor took that personally, issued merge-or-else ultimatums, then left. After leaving, they copied large parts of the code into a new repo, rewrote history to remove attribution, changed licensing in ways that likely violate GPLv3, and went public claiming ReVanced was “hostile” or “dead”. ... For context, the fingerprint system is how ReVanced finds the right parts of YouTube’s code to modify even as YouTube updates and shuffles things around. Inefficient or overly abstract changes increase the chance of things breaking later. The contributor wanted a quick duct-tape style fix, the maintainers wanted a proper redesign, and it all spiraled from there.

The fourth link there is a thread where the maintainer (who didn't leave) posted a 30-page PDF 'receipt' of why the morphe guy was in the wrong, followed by him sealioning any comment that pointed out his entire way of writing is too confrontational, dismissive and blunt.

If dude knew how to word things constructively/took the same courses Linus had to, this never would have happened.

Toxic moderation is what the reddit admins want and wanted, they punished mods for doing it any other way. Most (but not all) of the good mods bailed over two years ago now.

Yes, it's one of the most stable alternatives in my experience.

FYI in case you didnt know, Tubular is a newpipe fork with sponsorblock built in

Grey jay is what I've been using since revanced broke. It's been great for me.

Never heard of that but I kinda doubt that's reason, since Google also started moving against adblockers in Chrome around that time, and the lost revenue from advertising just seems like a more substantial reason than some copyright NFT stuff.

Either way, had YT Vanced been open-source at the time someone could have just forked it the next day, so I hope this time around whoever is maintaining the project learned from that.