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 [email protected]

    • Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      4·
      5 days ago

      My only issue with Grayjay (both Android and Windows app), is you have to manually export the videos out of Grayjay

      If you try to grab the files directly, they don’t work.

        • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
          115·
          5 days ago

          It doesn’t allow for forking so it is effectively proprietary. It is critical that the community can fork something when they don’t like the direction.

          • Refurbished Refurbisher@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
            51·
            5 days ago

            Oh, I didn’t know that. Yeah, I don’t like that at all.

            I use Tubular (Newpipe with Sponsorblock) from polymorphicshade, though lol.

            Been a NewPipe user since the very first alpha

            • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
              34·
              4 days ago

              It doesn’t respect the 4 freedoms thus it isn’t foss. Use it if you want but keep in mind that FUTO has full control over the rights of Grayjay.

          • CausticFlames@sopuli.xyzEnglish
            13·
            5 days ago

            I agree that’s an important aspect of open source, but for me personally it’s more about being able to audit what is running on my machine. the fact that they show you the code lets me see and confirm for myself that they aren’t doing anything shady like spying. Though it might not be good enough for some people it definitely is for me.

            It’s a level of transparency you won’t ever get from truly “proprietary” software.

            • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
              3·
              4 days ago

              My concern is that FUTO will start claiming that some other third party clients are stealing the code.

              Be mindful that you don’t look at the Grayjay code before contributing to something like Newpipe

  • JaggedRobotPubes@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    4 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.

  • mbirth@lemmy.mlEnglish
    6·
    5 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.

  • John Colagioia@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    14·
    5 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.”

  • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
    401·
    5 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
      2·
      4 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
        2·
        3 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.

  • d00phy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    52·
    5 days ago

    On iOS, I uninstalled the app and use Brave for YT & if I need to get on Reddit.

    • vulgarcynic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      4 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
        4·
        4 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.

        Edit: response from FUTO

        Seems to be related to UMP streams and we have issue opened for it and it’s top priority for us to fix this now. It is however very complex so it takes time to fix it but at least we figured out why it is happening and once it is fixed it should be a smooth experience on Youtube at least for a while until they change something else on their backend…

        • vulgarcynic@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          4 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.

  • Aku@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    5 days ago

    Anything work for iOS? I was using a side loaded app but it recently stopped working.