As it stands, both Piped and Invidious are dead. Because od that, I almost completely stopped watching youtube but l’d still sometimes like to check what the people I follow posted (I used to do that via Piped). Are there any new ways of following people without actually using Google? I’m aware of the tools that download new videos as they come out but I’m more interested in just “subscribing”, kinda like RSS?
Ideally it would be on iOS

Edit: I found it, “Unwatched” on iOS is awesome, thanks to !FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone

  • jevans ⁂@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    18 days ago

    As others have said, invidious is not dead, and they’re working on factoring out the part that interfaces with YouTube itself, so that updates to react to changes in YouTube will be able to be implemented much faster.

  • lent9004@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    18 days ago

    Addressing the subscribing part; I had similar requirements, so I started subscribing via FreshRSS while using a custom theme to give it a YouTube-like experience.

    I shared the setup a few month ago here: https://lemmy.world/post/21381606

    Edit: One of the benefits of using selfhosted RSS with a web interface is that it is platform agnostic.

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    18 days ago

    I just use Newpipe

    However, Piped and Invidious are not dead. YouTube is trying really hard to kill them but they still work somewhat. It is a cat and mouse game.

    • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
      0·
      17 days ago

      They’re effectively dead. I haven’t ever found a single instance that works for more than a few days in years, despite people constantly recommending them.

      • madeofpendletonwool@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        17 days ago

        Probably because people self-host them. I have an invidious instance self-hosted and use clipious on android to watch videos on it. Feels super modern and have pretty much no issues. Public instances usually don’t work because of datacenter ips get blocked by YouTube.

  • fitgse@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    18 days ago

    I was using freshrss which can grab the rad feed for a channel, but I’ve moved to tube archivist with a Jellyfin plugin. Now they are all predownloaded and just show up on my tv via Jellyfin app.

    It’s a way better way to keep track of what you want to watch.

    • Konraddo@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      18 days ago

      Just curious if there’s a setting in any of those applications that removes downloaded videos which have been watched at least once, and after x amount of time? It’s sort of like a watch list. If watched, I don’t want to keep the video. But if I do, I can add it to a playlist and let PinchFlat download it for archive.

  • mbirth@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    18 days ago

    I’m using News Explorer for my RSS feeds which also supports subscribing to YouTube channels. In the newer versions it even pulls the comments from YT.

  • JaggedRobotPubes@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    18 days ago

    Revanced and Firefox + uBlock Origin.

    First one’s hard to set up, but I’m sure anybody self-hosting literally anything could do it in two seconds.

  • Fisch@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    0·
    18 days ago

    On my phone I still use LibreTube but with the option to load the video directly from YouTube (essentially doing what NewPipe is doing) and on PC I just use YouTube’s directly. I still use Piped to keep my subscriptions synchronized tho.

    • vulgarcynic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      0·
      18 days ago

      Grayjay started shitting the bed on me recently (Android via Samsung and Graphene, and on Desktop Linux/Windows) unless I disable vpn.

      Even with Agent andDNS whitelisting for the apps.

      A bit of a bummer after recently donating.

      • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
        0·
        18 days ago

        That’s not GrayJay. That’s YT. They’ve started blocking access to users who use a VPN without logging in.

        God forbid they don’t know everything about you.

        • vulgarcynic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          0·
          18 days ago

          Aye, that was my suspicion. Really awesome to be stripped of options for privacy so they can suck down that data.

          Yt-dlp still works thankfully.

  • John Colagioia@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    18 days ago

    I believe that YouTube supports RSS. I haven’t used it in years, but gPodder allowed subscribing to channels.

    Ah, yeah. From this post:

    • Go to the YouTube channel page.
    • Click more for the About box.
    • Scroll down to click Share channel. Choose Copy channel ID.
    • Get the feed from https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id plus that channel ID from the previous step.

    From there, something (like a podcast client) needs to grab the video.

    Otherwise, I’ve been using Tartube to download to my media server, which is not great but fine, except for needing to delete the lock file when it (or the computer) crashes, and the fact that the media server hasn’t the foggiest idea of how to organize the “episodes.”