FreeTube

Hey everyone! I'd like to take some time to discuss some new things coming to FreeTube along with other news that I'll be announcing today. Just by reading this you may have already noticed a change or two. I'm excited to show it off so let's get started!

Document All the Things!

As FreeTube grows, it's become more difficult to answer all the questions that come my way. I try my best to answer what I can, however time just doesn't allow me to answer everything in a timely manner (If you've sent me an email in the past month or so, I'm very sorry I haven't gotten around to responding, I'll try to do so here soon!). To add to that, many questions that come my way are questions that I've answered several times before (Like if I'll be adding a port for iOS / Android, the answer is I'm not) and there currently isn't any good location to keep these answers for others to reference. We've been using the Wiki feature on GitHub for a while now, however it's clear that it's time for something a little more accessible.

I'm pleased to announce the new official documentation site for FreeTube, found at https://docs.freetubeapp.io/. This site contains a lot of information about FreeTube along with projects that are associated with the application. There's already articles on general usage, community, and even getting started with contributing towards the project. To get started with the site, I'd recommend going through our FAQ page as well as our common issues that will answer most of the questions that I typically receive. Outside of that, you might find something useful in the usage section.

This site is generated using Jekyll and is hosted via GitHub pages. This means that we don't have to worry about any extra hosting costs for this site and it means that it's easy for others to contribute to the documenation. The repository is hosted here and all articles are written using Markdown, which means you don't have to have any programming knowledge to contribute to the documentation.

Early feedback has told me that there's a bit of information here that wasn't known about the project or features that are in the application, so do give it a read if you ever have some time. I'm also open to feedback on how we can improve our documentation along with new articles / topics we should add to the site. Please add a new issue over on the Docs GitHub repository and we can start a discussion on what to include.

Really looking forward to seeing what everyone thinks!

Blog Changes

In other news, you might have noticed a slightly different look to the blog site (If you're viewing this on Write.as that is). Write.as has a platform has been a nice platform to host our blogs and because of this I have decided to commit to the platform and have purchased a pro plan for this blog.

Not only do we get to support a company dedicated to providing a free and open source solution, but we also get some extra perks that we didn't receive before. The first one that you've probably noticed is the slightly new look for the blog page. I wanted to keep the minimal layout that's currently on the site but wanted to add some of the theming that's located on the main FreeTube website, I hope you like it!

The other big feature is that we can now use our own domain for the site. You can now find all of the FreeTube blog posts over at https://blog.freetubeapp.io. The next FreeTube update will start using this URL as well so hopefully this makes it easy to find the site.

Lastly, we can now have a couple of more blogs separate from this one in case we want to categorize some different types of blog posts. Nothing with this will be happening right away, however there's a chance we could have one for non-FreeTube posts and be more generalized around privacy. I can say for sure that I'll eventually do a follow up on last year's Pinephone Review and when that happens it'll be located in a new blog location. I'll be sure to keep everyone updated for when that happens. If you happen to have other ideas for non-FreeTube blog posts, then please let me know.

Wrapping Up

That's all I had for today. There's some really nice updates in store for FreeTube in the near future, so hopefully I'll be able to share more about that at some point. Thanks again to everyone for their continued support!