Teaching feed readers about YouTube subscriptions | Hacker News Reader

Teaching feed readers about YouTube subscriptions

lectio.news

17 pointslightandlight14 comments

I wrote a program that exposes my YouTube subscriptions as a news feed. It's seriously a relief to finally have this stuff show up in [my feed reader](https://www.newsblur.com).

It's not a "Show HN" because there's no way for others to try it (yet).

Some things I'm curious about:

* Is anyone else here doing something similar?

* Would anyone like to use this service?

* Are there other YouTube-meets-news-feed features that you'd love to see?

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.

> YouTube publishes Atom feeds for channels (as of 2025-06-28) and makes them available via <link rel="alternate">

This is very good to know!

I've always just gone to the youtube channel page, view source, search for "rss", copy the URL and paste it into my feed reader. It would be great if it was more discoverable, but it's not really like you need a whole separate tool.

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

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

not if you want to keep your youtube subscriptions for a reason or another

Why though? You already have the feed urls. A list of urls is the same a subscribing to channels essentially. Both do the job of letting you know a new video is released.

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.

I’ve built ytemail.com to fix a similar itch, mostly because I was the 0.1% that liked the YouTube email notifications before Google killed it. No open registrations, but I can hook you up if you email me at contact@<domain>.

As a fun side note. This location is prohibited by robots.txt

I personally don't care, as big tech CEO already said in dawn of AI that they don't care about robots.txt

Additionally I have a project that is able to read RSS links and provides it in JSON response

https://github.com/rumca-js/crawler-buddy

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

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.

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