I host my own instance and it’s pretty great. With a disabled home page feed, I don’t get distracted with random “popular” crap. I only seek our videos that I need and it has reduced my YouTube consumption considerably.
Hilariously, YT has disabled the homepage feed if you have search history disabled. They think this will make people turn search history on… So now I always come to a nice clean homepage before I go looking for through my subscriptions.
That is hilarious because it first happened way back when GDPR was in the news, to me at least, I opted out because why not. Sure enough a lot of features stopped working. But here's the funny part, they came back! And from then until just a a month ago I've had my search history "disabled" but all those features working. Then suddenly a month ago they told me yet again that I have to enable search history and this time they disabled all the same shit.
This is amazing. Thank you for that. I love the clean look of my empty homepage!