I find it frustrating that no discernable effort is being visibly made to pass this project on to another dev or group of devs.
Just unceremoniously announcing it’s going down. After a successful fundraiser at the beginning of this year.
I don’t know where the funds went, nor do I understand the abruptness of the closing of the project. I’m suspecting that this is a ragequit. Something happened somewhere quietly that led to the developer deciding that they cannot maintain any longer.
This is, in short, quite disappointing.
To anyone; if you do respond to this comment; do not try defend them. Instead, try to provide more context, or evidence that shows I have misread the situation. Arguing about how long he worked, or how passionate he was in the past, does not change the current facts. Provide more facts if you must argue.
FreeTube is a useful project as it allows you to “fallback” on a non-preferred frontend.
https://github.com/FreeTubeApp/FreeTube
This allows you to continue to use Youtube irregardless of which frontend is (potentially not) working.
In ‘Settings > General’ you’ll want to select “Invidious API” as your “Preferred API backend” and specify your favorite invidious instance in the “Current Invidious Instance” field and click “Set Current Instance as Default”. This locks FreeTube into the specified instance.
Then, when you notice that FreeTube is issuing notices to you about your favorite Invidious Instance being down, you can wander back to ‘Settings > General’; hit the “Clear Default Invidious Instance” Button and wait as FreeTube magically contacts the “https://api.invidious.io/” page for you and selects a new, and hopefully online and working Invidious instance. (You may have to hit this button several times to roll a working instance, Hit the button, check the subs page and see if everything loads, repeat if it falls back on the Local API.)
When you run into instances where you can’t roll up a good Invidious instance; the built in Local API is running a NewPipe Extractor like API directly from your FreeTube client. Not the best; but at least it keeps things working while you wait for the Invidious devs to fix things up; and it still reasonably preserves as much of your privacy as it can while doing this to the best effort it can.
…Sadly this doesn’t work when Google manages a double combo of breaking both Invidious and NewPipe; but I have found that this is less often the case and the devs of either project are usually fairly quick about getting fixes out. Bless their hard work with a donation sometime maybe, if you can.