 |
|
I've probably watched (actively and passively) on average, hours of YouTube every day for a decade. In all that time, RSS is exclusively how I've consumed those videos, aside from sometimes clicking on videos in the sidebar of the video I arrived at via RSS.
If RSS goes away and no 3rd party is able to restore it, I really don't know what I'd do. I can't imagine stopping watching all of the channels I follow, but I also can't imagine using email or app notifications. Those vectors are simply unacceptable for the nature of this particular information stream.
reply
|
|
|
|
There are multiple ways to solve your case:
- set up an account with email notifications and use something like KillTheNewsletter to deliver them via RSS
- set up your own alternative YouTube frontend (or register for a public one like kavin.rocks) that supports RSS feeds. Things like Piped or Invidious support it iirc.
- get an actual YouTube account and work with subscriptions. You support the channel you like with it and have everything in a handy overview.
I am a big time RSS user but never took the time to move it all over there, been using the subscriptions page as my YouTube “homepage” for a decade now and it works for me.
reply
|
|
|
|
- KillTheNewsletter
Looks like I'd have to make a YouTube account for every channel to get separate feeds, or else combine every channel into one big feed.
- subscriptions
Similarly, it looks like this is just one big list of videos from every channel, with only a handful fitting on screen at once, and they don't go away once I've watched/clicked on the video, so there's no concept of read/unread. It also means I would have yet another aggregation webpage I periodically visit, as opposed to having most of my information feed in two places (one tab for email and one tab for RSS).
- set up your own alternative
This is currently outside my skillset, but it may ultimately be the direction I go in (if the outage isn't just a bug). Thanks for these nouns - I can use them to get started.
reply
|
|
|
|
I'm pretty much in the same boat as you-- all my YouTube consumption has been thru my self-hosted RSS reader. I really like read/unread for all my "media" (blogs, YouTube, etc) in a single place.
All those alternatives sound bad to me.
I suppose in the short term I will cobble something together w/ yt-dlp to download JSON from YouTube and ETL that into the tt-rss database. That'll work until Google decides it doesn't, too.
reply
|
|
|
|
I'm not sure how much programming experience you have, but I'd imagine it'd be a fairly quick Python script to scrape all of your subscriptions and put things together in RSS form. You could probably build a quick Flask app which serves the RSS feed from some custom query string representing a YouTube video id. With ChatGPT you could probably build this out in a day.
reply
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Both the OP's URL and the one linked by @xnx work for me, could it have been temporary? Or maybe a caching issue? (And my region's YouTube CDN servers aren't affected?) Could be Google are actually removing this but A/B testing it first?
reply
|
|
|
|
I use Youtube's RSS feeds in one of my programs and this happens once every couple of months. They'll 404 or 503 for half a day and then come back.
Not looking forward to the day they don't come back, of course!
reply
|
|
|
|
|
|
Confirmed working for me again, too. My feed reader is updating again.
I think I'm still going to look at building a yt-dlp/JSON to RSS alternative, though. I don't trust that this isn't foreshadowing and not a bug.
reply
|
|
|
|
RSS feeds are resolving for me again, and the embedded YouTube crash I mentioned in this thread seems to have simultaneously stopped. Hopefully whatever this was has been reverted.
reply
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
That’s a bummer if true and not a temporary issue. The RSS is my workflow for creating a newsletter and if RSS does not work then I’m way less likely to include any yt content because I simply won’t come across this. It’s not like Google would care about this either.
reply
|
|
|
|
I hope this is a bug and gets fixed.
The site never worked for me. "Watch later" a list of dead videos of which I can't even find out the names.
Since I found the feeds I use only RSS with Feedbro.
Well.. I will properly save a lot of time not watching youtube anymore.
reply
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I clicked on one of the ones I follow and it showed a 500 error, then after refreshing it showed a 404 error, so hopefully temporary, but this being Google, these feeds were clearly going to disappear one day.
reply
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|