FreeTube

Hey everyone! It's been a while, I know.

I'm back to celebrate an important milestone, FreeTube officially turns 1 year old! It has been an amazing year and the amount of support for FreeTube has been overwhelming.

New Website

To go along with the anniversary, I'd like to announce the new FreeTube website. We now have a home at https://freetubeapp.io. This should allow a friendlier way of seeing what FreeTube is all about.

The site is purposely made with little / no JavaScript so certain design elements need to consider that. Matomo is used for local analytics and you can opt-out by disabling JavaScript or by enabling the Do Not Track setting in your browser. The site is also open source as well if you'd like to take a peek.

We also have shortcut links to various services about FreeTube. You can use http://source.freetubeapp.io to go to the GitHub page, http://blog.freetubeapp.io for the blog, and http://chat.freetubeapp.io to go to our Matrix server.

New Release

We also have a new release! Version 0.5.0 is now available. The changelog is posted alongside this post.

A Year of Statistics

I have made one post on Reddit about FreeTube and I have relied soley on word of mouth since that post. I believe that the community should determine the success of this project and right now we are in a very comfortable position.

As a privacy based application, I don't have a lot of statistics about it, but I'd like to share what I do have.

After one year of FreeTube, we have: – 663 Stars on GitHub – 98 Users in the Matrix server – 37,129 Total Downloads – 9,759 Downloads of v0.4.1 – 40% Windows Downloads – 5% Mac Downloads – 55% Linux Downloads

These statistics will be great to look back on as FreeTube grows. While this isn't the best metrics to determine user count, it's the best I have at this time, and I'm pleased with where we're at.

How FreeTube Started

I started FreeTube as a passion project. My time digging into the rabbit hole of privacy has changed the way I use things a lot. I became more aware at how I was being tracked and for what reasons. Things like YouTube became an invaluable source of both entertainment and knowledge that I and quite a few others were not ready to give up.

The tracking became too much for me when I was being introduced to a show on Netflix. It was relatively new at the time but I haven't heard of it yet. A friend came over to my house to log in to his Netflix account on my TV (as I don't have a Netflix account) and we watched a few episodes. A couple of days pass and my YouTube suggestions are now flooded with recommendations for this show that I haven't heard of until recently. The only connection between my YouTube account and my “interest” in this show was my friend's Netflix account that happened to be on the same network watching it.

Now, maybe I was reaching too far to make the connection, but it was too strange to me to think otherwise. I started thinking of ways to prevent this from happening again. HookTube was alive and doing well at the time which helped. The lack of any subscription support made it difficult to use as an ideal alternative though. I waited a while with the idea of “someone else will probably make what I want” (Looking back, Invidious did come out shortly after FreeTube so I was kinda right in that regards). I never found the solution that I wanted so I got to work on FreeTube and now we're here.

It has been an amazing year and I can't wait to see where FreeTube goes after this. Thank you all for the amazing support that you've given me. Here's to another year!