My pet project is showing Youtube feeds nicely, along with other rss feeds, twitter feeds and searches and telegram channels. I've been working on it for the past year, still in beta, but I'd love to get feedbacks: https://aggly.com
Looks nice, maybe it lacks some categories. For example I was looking for cycling (both as sport and outdoor activity), bikepacking and chess but there doesn't seem to be anything related
Quite interesting, seems like something I would find useful.
However, is there documentation or even an "About" page anywhere? Some info on which sites are supported and how to add them, as well as user limits? At least on mobile (which seems surprisingly nice, from what I can see), I don't see it.
I do like the overall design and the customizability.
EDIT: I found some info in the miniscule "Terms of Use" link at the bottom of the page when I clicked on the link to create a new account:
https://aggly.com/terms
And then I guessed at the url for pricing information by typing in aggly.com/pricing, which redirected me to:
https://aggly.com/account
(I don't know how to get there from the home page, though)
I haven't found info on what "API access" is good for, though. Is there a description?
Also, would there be any way to integrate paid SubStack subscriptions? (I admittedly haven't looked into this much)
EDIT 2: also, is there an option for a more compact view of a feed, with just the titles and no images? Also, is there a way to filter a feed (or a whole bunch of feeds) by date range? Otherwise, I can see it becoming pretty hard to find something older, eventually, having to click "load more" over and over again...
> Access to feeds from this network are restricted due to continued abuse of the service, which brings down the performance of feeds for everyone else. You'll need to use a verification token or use a different network to restore access
Ahh, good to know that my regular ISP got banned for something I have no clue about. Can't even read the blog.
FYI you can just write a quick script to replace that with http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID and it works, at least on a desktop firefox browser with an adblocker on it. Weirdly, it seems to explicitly not work in Discord?
Discord has special handling for certain websites' embeds, including YouTube. Maybe because they already have to pull other video information by ID, they determine whether to use the shorts player based on YouTube's API rather than the URL used.
This has been a big issue for me. I currently use RSS exclusively to view the YouTube channels that I'm subscribed to -- currently about 75 channels (and 27 nebula channels) -- and over half of my YouTube feeds are filled with several shorts (sometimes multiple ones by the same creator per day).
Looking for hashtags in the title and marking those videos as read is essentially muscle memory at this point.
I see people are doing scripts or other things to remove shorts from their feeds, but there is a simpler solution. Take your RSS URL of a channel, e.g.:
I went to see a video I'd uploaded to Youtube a while ago and it's now a short. I have no idea how it became a youtube short. Either I grandpa'd it or they upgrade all vertical form video to shorts.
I subscribe to feeds by just copying the human-readable url (right-click on the channel's title). When I embed the videos from these channels only the long videos are embedded, the shorts are not (has to do with a different url for shorts). So no problems here.
I do have a problem with old videos getting presented as new videos. Videos from weeks ago get a publication date of two days ago. Sometimes I just don't know - based on a thumbnail - if I've already seen the video.
Stuff I like, I often store, or make notes of. I don't personally use RSS for it, but perhaps I should make a kebman's curated YouTube RSS feed? It'll be kinda AI heavy tho...
Unfortunately, navigating to this page seems to display:
> Too many requests are being made from an unsupported application. This unfortunately degrades the experience and makes feeds slow for everyone else. Please try back later.
My first page load just now responded “Sorry / We seem to be having some technical difficulties. Hang tight...” (unknown status code). Second eventually returned 502 Gateway Timeout. Third gave 429 with the message you describe. Fourth eventually gave the actual page.
> if we add a feed to specifically follow the channel's full-length, higher quality video content, that's what we want to see. Shorts are the opposite of that. They're impulse content, designed for infinite scroll, not for a feed reader
I'm officially asking for it.
On the channels I'm subscribing to, nothing is wrong with the shorts except the UI covering up part of the video. They're not lower quality, and while you could call a lot of them "impulsive", a lot of longer videos are also impulsive!
I feel like I live in an alternate world to most people because shorts seem resoundingly Fine to me. They have some advantages and disadvantages but overall it's on par with the rest of the site. Not some weird addictive slop feed.
I have a bone to pick with the edited title this was submitted under.
The article’s title is “YouTube, your feeds are broken”. The word “RSS” was added to the submission title. That’s factually incorrect: YouTube feeds are Atom, and have been since at least 2009. Even if they have from early days even to this day had a terrible habit of incorrectly labelling the <link rel="alternate"> tags with type="application/rss+xml" and title="RSS" or similar.
(I hate RSS. Awful thing, should have died more than twenty years ago. For all domains outside outside the benighted world of podcasting where Apple ruined things, Atom is the strictly better choice, and has been for full twenty years.)
I think that battle is lost. RSS is already terminology the internet is slowly forgetting, being pedantic and insisting some RSS feeds should actually be called Atom feeds will only accelerate that.
I've been having some success by configuring my RSS reader with simple rules, like "please don't tell me about shorts" and "I don't care if this person is live right now." Too bad the real homepage shows three enormous thumbnails and pretty much exclusively the things I want to not see.
It's been pretty obvious for a long time that Youtube doesn't want you to have an objective view of anything. It wants you to trust in the Algorithm to spoonfeed you content. Even the subscription page now displays some arbitrary shit first. I'm absolutely sick of it.
Apparently, this guy doesn't get that RSS is a problem to Google, that they already tried to kill. Of course the neglect is by design. The only reason they keep RSS going is that there is a return on it and it does bring in users - such as me.
When Youtube removed email notifications I had to build a RSS->email tool, I don't send mails for videos that have no duration (livestreams) and videos <1min.
while we're complaining about this platform that desperately needs (but will never find) competition, it's fucked up that we can't access Watch History and Watch Later playlists via the api.
Now I just use the like button which triggers an IFTTT applet to send a webhook to my server which downloads the video. (Sadly IFTTT has no "when you add to a playlist" trigger.)
>When visiting a YouTube channel, there's no link to follow it in a feed reader, no "add feed" button, nothing.
There is literally a bell which you can set it so all videos get sent to your notification feed.
>But when that mission starts bleeding into the feeds of users who don't want it, it becomes a big problem.
Most people love shorts. It had extremely fast growth and continues to get a ton of engagement. Not wanting to see shorts is a small minority. It is disingenuous to pretend that no one wanted shorts when engagement is though the roof with the product.
I have a MiniFlux instance running on my Raspberry Pi, pulling from my 367 subscribed channels. It beats having to go through the "Subscripitons" page every day on the horrible YouTube UI, instead I can just go through the list in the feed, mark the uninteresting ones as read, keep the good videos in the feed and whenever I have time I can pick from those to watch.
I also have some feeds tagged as "music", for which I have a cronjob that calls yt-dlp to download the songs/mixes, nicely stashing the M4A files on a NAS, so I can keep up with new music, going through new releases at my own pace, keeping the good ones, deleting the shit ones.
If you ever had favorited songs deleted from YouTube, you will understand why this all makes sense.
Take your RSS URL of a channel, e.g.:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCxSGC9B...
Replace the `channel_id` with `playlist_id` and replace `UC` with `UULF`. This prefix will only list normal videos:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULFxSG...
You can find a bit more information here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71192605/how-do-i-get-yo...
From your link:
> However, this pattern was found by me by acquiring all playlists from "UUAA" to "UUZZ" and is not officially announced by YouTube.
Okay, this was reverse engineered and there's no promise from Google on that :-)
I wonder how they use these feeds if that's only internal.
I do like the overall design and the customizability.
EDIT: I found some info in the miniscule "Terms of Use" link at the bottom of the page when I clicked on the link to create a new account: https://aggly.com/terms
And then I guessed at the url for pricing information by typing in aggly.com/pricing, which redirected me to: https://aggly.com/account (I don't know how to get there from the home page, though)
I haven't found info on what "API access" is good for, though. Is there a description?
Also, would there be any way to integrate paid SubStack subscriptions? (I admittedly haven't looked into this much)
EDIT 2: also, is there an option for a more compact view of a feed, with just the titles and no images? Also, is there a way to filter a feed (or a whole bunch of feeds) by date range? Otherwise, I can see it becoming pretty hard to find something older, eventually, having to click "load more" over and over again...
Ahh, good to know that my regular ISP got banned for something I have no clue about. Can't even read the blog.
YouTube page contains HTML link to RSS feed in channel page, and most RSS clients should just pick it up just fine.
By the way I maintain a list of feeds, many of them are youtube in link below, so if you would like to find a channel you can use it
Links:
h ttps://github.com/rumca-js/awesome-database-feeds
Stupid, but it works.
This has been a big issue for me. I currently use RSS exclusively to view the YouTube channels that I'm subscribed to -- currently about 75 channels (and 27 nebula channels) -- and over half of my YouTube feeds are filled with several shorts (sometimes multiple ones by the same creator per day).
Looking for hashtags in the title and marking those videos as read is essentially muscle memory at this point.
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCxSGC9B...
Replace the `channel_id` with `playlist_id` and replace `UC` with `UULF`. This prefix will only list normal videos:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=UULFxSG...
----
From this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48032508
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qc5PKbJ3tq4
Entirely possible it's the former.
I've already seen the full video, I don't want to see clips of it again.
Also 90% of my RSS reading is done on a desktop/laptop and it feels "wrong" to watch 30 second vertical shorts on a 32" display :D
I do have a problem with old videos getting presented as new videos. Videos from weeks ago get a publication date of two days ago. Sometimes I just don't know - based on a thumbnail - if I've already seen the video.
Stuff I like, I often store, or make notes of. I don't personally use RSS for it, but perhaps I should make a kebman's curated YouTube RSS feed? It'll be kinda AI heavy tho...
> Too many requests are being made from an unsupported application. This unfortunately degrades the experience and makes feeds slow for everyone else. Please try back later.
> if we add a feed to specifically follow the channel's full-length, higher quality video content, that's what we want to see. Shorts are the opposite of that. They're impulse content, designed for infinite scroll, not for a feed reader
I'm officially asking for it.
On the channels I'm subscribing to, nothing is wrong with the shorts except the UI covering up part of the video. They're not lower quality, and while you could call a lot of them "impulsive", a lot of longer videos are also impulsive!
I feel like I live in an alternate world to most people because shorts seem resoundingly Fine to me. They have some advantages and disadvantages but overall it's on par with the rest of the site. Not some weird addictive slop feed.
The article’s title is “YouTube, your feeds are broken”. The word “RSS” was added to the submission title. That’s factually incorrect: YouTube feeds are Atom, and have been since at least 2009. Even if they have from early days even to this day had a terrible habit of incorrectly labelling the <link rel="alternate"> tags with type="application/rss+xml" and title="RSS" or similar.
(I hate RSS. Awful thing, should have died more than twenty years ago. For all domains outside outside the benighted world of podcasting where Apple ruined things, Atom is the strictly better choice, and has been for full twenty years.)
Now I just use the like button which triggers an IFTTT applet to send a webhook to my server which downloads the video. (Sadly IFTTT has no "when you add to a playlist" trigger.)
There is literally a bell which you can set it so all videos get sent to your notification feed.
>But when that mission starts bleeding into the feeds of users who don't want it, it becomes a big problem.
Most people love shorts. It had extremely fast growth and continues to get a ton of engagement. Not wanting to see shorts is a small minority. It is disingenuous to pretend that no one wanted shorts when engagement is though the roof with the product.
I also have some feeds tagged as "music", for which I have a cronjob that calls yt-dlp to download the songs/mixes, nicely stashing the M4A files on a NAS, so I can keep up with new music, going through new releases at my own pace, keeping the good ones, deleting the shit ones.
If you ever had favorited songs deleted from YouTube, you will understand why this all makes sense.