this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
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Grayjay is the source available video client that has plugin support for youtube. It's not open source like freetube, new pipe, etc... but they are trying to do the right thing

Strong opinions:

  • Dark mode only
  • Not open source

They are trying to do some cool things

  • Sync watch history peer to peer across devices,
  • Follow a creator on multiple platforms

Things they do really well

  • Their youtube plugin works really well, when freetube and newpipe have issues, gray jay always still works

This is all great, right? Whats the problem - Youtube has had some RSS hiccups over the last few days, which added a bunch of friction with freetube, so I thought I'd give grayjay another spin....

It's not ready to replace freetube, the strong opinions!, the desktop client is alpha, with a large number of channels the subscription video list drops lots of videos, can't really filter by watched videos, can't mark a video as watched... rough stuff that freetube gets right

The killer feature should be cross device watch history! (Nobody else is doing this! desktop, android, desktop)... and yet, it doesn't really work. At least with the desktop clients they don't sync unless you repair to the phone, etc

I don't think I can really use grayjay as a daily driver, I'll keep giving it a go when freetube has hiccups... so i'm not done with it.

Unlike freetube you can't support grayjay with crypto, only with stripe! sigh

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[–] jet@hackertalks.com 1 points 5 days ago

I dislike 'source available' - We only have to look at new pipe and pipe pipe to see why... New pipe doesn't agree with sponsor block so they don't include it... pipe pipe just follows new-pipe and includes sponsorblock... So users have the option of new pipe, or pipe pipe - depending on the experience they want - all thanks to open source.

In the source available word we can't get someone to make a grayjay fork with light mode (instead of dark mode,, so brightjay)... because while they can see the source they can't fork the source... This means that all the friction that people would either solve themselves in a push request or in a fork... just get dropped on the feat of grayjay developers as issues and the ecosystem suffers with sloth or abscense