Yeah I think Lemmy would actually work pretty reasonably. It reminds me of how lots of software and projects have Reddit communities. I agree that being able to share 1 account over many services, and especially not having to pay for infrastructure is something that drives discord use over forum-based platforms.

Personally, I’d prefer that projects use forums for community discussions rather than realtime chat platforms like Discord or Matrix. I think the bigger problem of projects using Discord is not that it’s closed source, but rather that it makes it difficult to search (since no indexing by search engines) and the format deprioritizes having discussion on a topic over a long period of time. Since Matrix is also intended for chat, it has these same issues (though at least you can preview a room without making an account).

I’ve been using FreeTube since Piped was very inconsistent for me, but I guess that’s just the nature of these services. I’ll have to check out Invidious again, last time I tried it was several years ago and I stopped using it after the main instance shut down. Is it still under active development? I remember its development status being unclear, partially because the language it uses is not super mainstream, but it’s probably changed since then.

Fortunately, Invidious, Piped, Libretube and Newpipe all exist and work flawlessly so there’s no excuse to use proprietary trash like that.

Isn’t the very point of this post that Invidious and Piped don’t work flawlessly?

Can’t you still modify and distribute Grayjay, just not commercially? I understand that still prevents the app from being considered open source, but their reasoning is valid IMO (to prevent people from making ad-infested clones on the play store, which has happened with NewPipe before).