¶ Introduction
Recently BugsWriter made a video Most ELEGANT way of using Youtube.. I tried it out, and improvised a bit on it.
¶ The Standard Workflow
Normally, a person uses YouTube with an account. Similarly, for every service, he/she will either sign up for an email newsletter (leading to email spam) or make a separate account. This is problematic for various reasons:
- YouTube by default is not private, and so are most services.
- Apart from privacy, it’s very tedious to manage and keep track of all the services.
- There’s a constant barrage of notifications, with no single source of truth for disabling them.
- There isn’t a single feed for consuming content.
¶ BugsWriter/Alternate Frontend Workflow
Using an alternate frontend fixes:
- Privacy issues, as requests are generally proxied.
- Notifications/distractions, to an extent, as alternate frontends are not incentivised to keep you hooked.
However:
- It’s still difficult to manage multiple services.
- There isn’t necessarily a (good) frontend for every service.
¶ Feed Reader Workflow
Using feeds fixes both of the above mentioned problems:
- All of your feeds are in one place. You can pause notifications or remove them completely.
- You don’t necessarily need a full frontend, just an RSS/Atom Bridge (in case the service doesn’t provide feeds). This is because the subscription requests will be proxied from your VPS.
- You can easily consume content from your phone during downtimes/travelling.
However, it has some caveats:
- You might face issues syncing if you don’t have a VPS.
- Some services might require an account just to view content(duh).
¶ References
- Miniflux, the feed reader I use.
- Invidious has proper YouTube feed proxying, though it is being worked on in Piped