Today was huge. I’ve separated myself enough from Google with Proton applications/services combined with other more privacy focused software and hardware to be able to completely delete my Google account.
It feels great to FINALLY be free of them. I’ve had an account there for decades.
I wish I could but… youtube.
(yes ik about alternate frontends but I’m subscribed to so many people that importing the subscriptions would take forever)
You can Google takeout your subscriptions to a json file you can then import to alternate front ends like newpipe.
You can follow your favorite youtubers using RSS. The format for it is https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channel-id>
You can go to your Google settings, do a Google takeout with Youtube and YouTube Music, which lets you export a file with all your subscriptions. This file gets sent to your Gmail inbox. Invidious, Newpipe, Piped, etc., they all support this file format. Import and enjoy. Hope that frees you from Youtube.
I moved to my own instance of Piped and haven’t looked back. Interestingly, I find that the whole platform have become less addicting as a result.
Yep I did the same thing, but running a private Invidious instance (frontend for YouTube) with only subscribed to the channels I really want to watch. Result is no more infinite rabbit hole of recommended videos, just the ones I really want to watch.
you should check out freetube
you can easily find a content creator’s channel id by browsing to their channel page on
https://yewtu.be
and checking out the url.you can then put that into a file which will be interpreted by an rss feed reader.
newsboat, for example, would use the following format (using LearnLinuxTV as an example):
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCxQKHvKbmSzGMvUrVtJYnUA YouTube "~Learn Linux TV"
whereas an app like feeder would require an opml file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <opml version="1.1"> <head> <title> Feeder </title> </head> <body> <outline title="Linux" text="Linux"> <outline title="Learn Linux TV" text="Learn Linux TV" type="rss" xmlUrl="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCxQKHvKbmSzGMvUrVtJYnUA"/> </outline> </body> </opml>