I consistently hear people on YouTube complain that the subscribe button doesn’t do anything for viewers, now that channel notifications are controlled by the bell. But it does do something: it puts the videos from that channel in your subscription feed, which is readily accessible on all versions of YouTube. So why do people act like it doesn’t exist? I think it’s super convenient, especially if you’re subscribed to a ton of channels and don’t want your notifications feed flooded with new videos.
This is the way. While YouTube has a subscription feed it is very basic. It has no organization, no way to filter watched videos and of course it only has videos from YouTube. Using the RSS feeds I get a much better interface and can follow all of my video sources in one place even if they are on different sites.
That sounds very interesting! Where do I start if I want to build my own RSS feed? Can you recommend any software (foss would be nice)? How do I add a subscription into the Feed?
You are looking for an “RSS Reader”. This is a tool to read RSS feeds (every channel on YouTube has a feed) and present the updates to you. There are many options including many open-source options.
Personally I run my own service which emails me new entries (I like email, I’m weird like that) and they get sorted into a folder for me to go through when I want to watch videos. But there are many other types of readers such as standalone apps, web services and other options. If you Google “feed reader” or “RSS reader” you should find many results.
Once you have selected a reader to try (don’t worry, you can use OMPL import + export if you want to try another one) then just paste the YouTube channel URLs into the reader and it should discover the feed for your. Of course the best thing about RSS is that it isn’t restricted to YouTube. PeerTube, Odysee, Nebula, most blogs, Reddit, Lemmy and many other sites support it. So you can subscribe to basically whatever you want to.
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