I used to use YouTube’s home feed as my primary way of watching videos, but I have grown tired of constantly seeing obvious clickbait and “mainstream”¹ content replace the videos I actually want to watch. I could just go one by one hiding or blocking the videos that I do not like, but I found that a better way was skipping the home entirely and using the subscription tab instead.

Using just the subscription tab allowed me to escape the platform’s algorithm, by only seeing a feed of videos from channels I specifically subscribed to, sorted by most recent.

But you won’t be able to find new channels!

Actually no, I did not lose the ability to find new channels because I can still check the recommended section on the side of a video, with the added bonus of them being related channels (in theory). However, there is a catch: you have to be using an account if you want to use the subscription tab. This was the only reason why I used to keep my YouTube account logged in all the time, and that is not that good if you think about it.

To resolve this issue, I found a great alternative that doesn’t involve Invidious nor Piped and works without issue.² I am now using RSS feeds to subscribe to YouTube channels. RSS is a standard way of recieving a feed of news and other content. You can use RSS to subscribe to most websites, recieve podcasts, and, yes, YouTube. To use it you need a program that combines or “aggregates” the feeds into a single place. Since I want to be able to access the same subscriptions on multiple computers, I went with selfhosted Miniflux.

Now, to add the channels to Miniflux you can add them one by one and Miniflux will find the RSS feed for each channel, or you can use this script I found. Thanks to that script I created an OPML file of all my subscriptions that I then imported to Miniflux. The final experience is awesome: you recieve a feed of the recently published videos of your subscriptions. You can watch videos without going to YouTube’s heavy website while still using it in a legit way (embedded videos). All of this without a google account. So far this has been a great way to follow my favorite channels.³

What about Shorts?

One drawback of this method is that you can’t use browser addons to block shorts from appearing on your feed. This is a huge problem since many channels spam shorts more frequently than actual videos. I found a fix for this, however, that involves, you guessed it, another script.