as far as I know, Youtube still supports RSS.
an account on a Piped or Invidious instance would do the job, too.
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
46 points (92.6% liked)
Privacy
32165 readers
873 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
It does. RSS is the way IMO.
I use FreshRSS and the chromium RSS subscription extension. I just go to a user's youtube page and click the extension icon and it subscribes me.
If I were you, I would just use Piped (piped.kavin.rocks). It stores all your subscriptions in Local Storage, and displays them in the "Feeds" section. The Feeds section also supports RSS, so you can get notified too. If you are on android, grab one of the Piped clients. NewPipe is the most recommended, but I really like the UI of LibreTube.
If you're on Android, you could check out Newpipe or Grayjay.
I prefer these Youtube-Player Alternatives for Android:
The way I solved this problem is by using an https://invidious.io/ instance.
Logins are easy to create, so you can have one for each subscription set you want to create
Private by default, so not even the fingerprint scripts are monitoring you
And the subscriptions page lists just your subscriptions in order of most recently released, nothing else shoved in
I know this is a bit offtopic, but on e621(warning: furry site) there is a userscript called Re621 that in the absence of a 'subscription' system allows you to subscribe and creates a kind of notification within the page that notifies you when an artist you subscribed to uploads new art, without the need for an account. Something like this would be ABSOLUTELY GREAT if it existed for Youtube, because I could just export my subscriptions and that's it, if I format my PC I don't lose my recommendations.
Since I can't really help and I don't know if something like this exists for Youtube, I wish it does because I also use Youtube without an account, but something I can suggest you is to use some instance of Piped and create an account (not related to Youtube, it only exists inside the instance) to be able to subscribe and save playlists, but only that in your case, because you will lose the personalized recommendations, you can also use FreeTube and subscribe locally to your favorite content creators there and export it as a backup so that if you were to format your PC, you can remember the names of the content creators to which you were subscribed.
You can use RSS feeds to know about new videos, and any feed reader/manager like Feedbro to manage them.