Just asking: Is there an open source project that I can self-host that can organize my current subscriptions into separate groups/categories and make things easy to view/hide/digest?
Many moons ago, I could hover and hide a video I didn't want to see in my feed with a single click. Best UX user feature evar... it was gone in a week or two I feel.
I'm kinda ashamed to say I have multiple youtube accounts to keep my sanity, but yeah.
EDIT: Sorry I realised you were asking more about categorisation and not downloading.
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The closest thing I can think of is Tube Archivist, which seems made for archiving large YouTube collections, including things like comments on videos.
I’ve had mixed luck with it and it’s a bit too heavy for my fairly limited needs. Youtube-dl hasn’t worked for me for the last month or so on it —- oddly enough I have a MeTube instance on the same physical machine (different VM) which is a lighter web UI for yt-dlp and which is still working fine. That’s Youtube’s fault I assume and not the fault of Tube Archivist.
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but Pocket Tube [1] [2] is a browser extension that lets you organize your subscriptions into custom groups. You can then browse non-algorithmic feeds showing the latest uploads from each group, which makes things much easier to manage and filter.
Hope this helps.
Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with Pocket Tube. I’m currently working on https://maxxmod.com, a YouTube-focused browser extension, so I’ve researched the ecosystem.
[1] Website: https://pockettube.io
[2] Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-subsc...
Yes any RSS reader works for this task.
There are two types of channel RSS feeds
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<CHANNEL_ID>
And the older
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=<username>
Youtube used to have an opml export button but there are a few github projects that convert the youtube subscription csv that dumps out of the account data export.
Edit: If you want to filter out shorts using the selfhosted application rssbridge allows you to do this.