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@gabek

first of all, congrats on the experiment.

It's been three weeks now since I've blocked YouTube on my home network. As much as I hate YouTube, I'd find myself watching stupid videos on it because of the algorithm for much longer than I anticipated.

perfect reason to drain the mental cluster (so to speak)

• I get sent a ton of YouTube links from people. So for each one, individually, I'll disable my PiHole for a couple of minutes. Long enough to watch that single video because somebody sent it.

i know it's likely cumbersome, but when people send me links i toss it through an outbound proxy i have on a vps upstream that doesn't block yt

I realize what I really want is to be able to only watch a small group of accounts, treating YouTube like a video podcast. When a new video goes live I can download it and watch it. No recommendations, no "other videos by this creator", nothing. Just one video at a time, allowing me to watch 5 videos a week or something that I care about. I'm going to look around to see if there's a system already built around this. Otherwise I might write some small shell scripts with youtube-dl or something. Though I don't know if there's API access to a user's video list.

probably many options for this. any channel or creator i'm interested in, i get the rss feed, a daemon pulls it every n(x) to check for updates. if there's an update, it drops the link to a sub-process to yt-dlp and of course pipes through the previous mentioned outbound proxy so i don't have to disable network-based ad/site blocking.

let me know if you want to ping-pong on this, happy to spike something out whether shell, go, etc