Create a completely new subs feed

[OsaSoft]

Heavily inspired by https://github.com/CodeNinjaUK/youtube-subs-grid In order to be able to manipulate the feed much more easily, creating a completely new one is the best solution.

Long term stretch goal for a version 2.0

[ddrzn]

This would be awesome, and it would fix a problem with the current subs feed : if you go too far in the past, YT doesn't show all videos, they show only the most viewed videos (min 500k views).

[OsaSoft]

Sadly I dont think a new feed could fix that, as I'd still have to load the videos from YT itself. I guess one of the few ways this could be avoided completely is if the new feed would be completely independent of YT subs feed and load videos directly by crawling through the videos of all subscribed channels, but Im a bit concerned about the perfomance problems with such an approach

[ddrzn]

Yeah I was thinking about crawling each channels (I never had the time to do it by myself). To avoid performance problems, I thought using the local storage to keep the data so we don't have to crawl again the whole channel (maybe it's a bad idea).

[Crimento]

+1 on this, would be great to see chronological subscriptions feed as separate page, even it takes time to parse each subscribed channel

[JeffJacobson]

I don't know if this is useful information, but YouTube channels have their own RSS feeds.

The TypeScript code below is from a repo of mine that converts a YouTube feed URL into its RSS Feed equivalent. This repo is under The Unlicense so you can use it without restriction as you see fit.

/**
 * Converts a YouTube channel URL into an RSS feed URL.
 * @param channelUrl A YouTube channel URL.
 * @returns A {@link URL} for the current channel.
 */
export function convertToFeedLink(channelUrl: string | URL) {
  // https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC25J6ueIa1L2NTqbbAeGN7A
  // https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC25J6ueIa1L2NTqbbAeGN7A

  const url = typeof channelUrl === "string" ? new URL(channelUrl) : channelUrl;

  // Get the end part of the URL which will be the channel ID.
  const parts = url.pathname.split("/");
  const channelId = parts[parts.length - 1];

  // Create output URL.
  return new URL(`feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=${channelId}`, url);
}

[grandslammer]

I think this would be a fantastic feature. Not sure if it should be incorporated into the current extension, or create a completely new repo. Maybe create a separate website (e.g. myyoutubesubscriptions.com) where a user would signin with their Google/YT account, and the website would automatically gather their subscriptions and present them to the user in an optimized layout.

This would also potentially act as a fix for the seemingly never-ending UI issues such as the random size thumbnails, or other issues which keep happening whenever there is a new YT update. We would potentially have full control over the UI without having to care about just making it work with YouTube's UI.