YouTube channels have RSS feeds. And in my RSS reader, Miniflux, they play back without ads.

So I wrote a ropey Python script to sync my YouTube subscriptions into a Miniflux category... https://code.s-n.me/stephen/youtube2miniflux

It's a bit of a rough user experience, but if you're self-hosting your RSS reader, then you can probably handle it. If I can summon the energy, I might make it nicer in time.

It's low effort on my part, but no fucking LLMs were involved in my part of it's creation.

Benefits also include unhooking from the algorithm, just videos from the channels I subscribe to in the order they were posted.

I'm determined to stop giving Google money. YouTube ads are fucking annoying, but Premium's gotta go.

I give money to a bunch of creators via Patreon, pay for Nebula and handful of other niche platforms, but there's still stuff I want to see from YT, and refuse to feel bad about avoiding ads.

@stephen there was at some point a version you could run on another machine and it would use the mobile app’s remote control API to do the same thing on TV but that stopped working.

@jon thanks! I'll get Sean to give that a go when our Premium subscription runs out. For me, I wanna see how I get on away from the temptations of the YT homepage.

We do watch quite a bit of YT on the TV, but I shoved an old NUC behind that this week, so that'll help.

@stephen I keep almost rage writing a tvOS app which only shows subscriptions in order because I have a nasty habit of sitting down in front of YouTube and then finding its 3 hours later and I’m watching some nonsense I have no real interest in.

@jon relatable