Teaching feed readers about YouTube subscriptions (opens in new tab)

I did maintain a list of all my subscriptions in FreshRSS for a while. I started doing this after I noticed Youtube was withholding videos from the subscription page and then showing them too me as something I might like on the home page. This really irritated me it broke my process for finding where I last was.

The problem was while I migrated in a big chunk using some jank javascript this wasn't a process that kept in sync and gradually over time it got out of date and the initial problem was fixed and I removed them all. I haven't yet seen an open source self hosted solution for this for getting the list and providing an Atom feed but its definitely something I want.

Right, and [kjkjadksj says](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44445957) a similar thing:

> If you have a feed reader system there is no need to subscribe [via YouTube] in the first place. You’ve obviated that system.

This approach works, and it's a great way to subscribe to public channels without a YouTube account. The main reason I'm not doing it is that I want to subscribe via YouTube.

> It would be great if it was more discoverable

Oh, hopefully there's a browser extension that detects feeds on a page and lights up and provides a menu. Shame that the YouTube mobile app isn't similarly extensible.

The feed reader I use (NetNewsWire) lets me simply put in the YouTube channel URL and it finds the feed.

I added all my subscriptions once, but it quickly became overwhelming, so I deleted them all. I’m not sure if bundling them all in a single feed would be better for me or not. I could bookmark my subscriptions page for the same effect. I find I’m in a very different headspace when I’m looking to watch YouTube vs reading my RSS feeds.

Most of the rss readers I know allow that. What OP built there is something that stays in sync with your subscriptions, so when you add or remove one it is automatically added or removed from you reader and do not need manual intervention

robots.txt does not "prohibit" anything. For some reason people have a misconception that robots.txt is used to block bots.

robots.txt is used to HELP bots. It tells bots what pages to visit and what pages are not intended for consumption. If a bot goes ahead and scraps everything anyway, that's entirely its own prerogative. Particularly for less sophisticated bots without a lot of storage, a good robots.txt can help it not get stuck on dynamically generated content or "useless for indexing" content.

Huh, you're right. What an odd choice to specifically ban automated tools from downloading RSS feeds in robots.txt