This is awesome. I watch a lot of YouTube (up to 3 hours a day at 3x speed) and do so completely ignoring the algorithm. I don’t use the homepage, I use the subscriptions tab almost exclusively. My chosen subscriptions show up in order of upload and nothing else.
My trepidation about your method in terms of separating yourself from google is that you are still using the YouTube website to browse for videos. My thought to get around this are as follows: I wish there was a way to automatically download all thumbnails and video titles and maybe descriptions for a list of youtube channels (updated every 5 minutes or something) and a checkbox system to download videos you want out of the list (and maybe a second option for only the first 5 minutes) This would be like a real subscription service. Very much the opposite of what google is doing today.
I would love to have a command line or small gui program to do this to watch the channels I like in this way.
You can do most of that with yt-dlp. It can download descriptions, thumbnails, even comments. If you pass the URL of a channel, it will download all videos from that channel, and you can also specify the age of the videos. You just need to figure out the command line options, and for that you can read the manual:
man yt-dlp
Or, if you have cloned the git repo like I did, the manpage won’t be installed, but you can still find the yt-dlp manual online.
I imagine I will have to make some script to call yt-dlp like every 5 minutes check for new uploads from my list of channels and to download any need title and thumbnails. and another part of the script to arrange the checkbox type system to select which videos to download. (I don’t want to have the terminal open or spent a bunch of energy typing the same commands all day) yt-dlp could download the thumbnail and then name the image files with the video titles could I then make the files click to make yt-dlp download the associated videos? I guess I might make them .desktop files using a script? idk. and the files would change in someway to indicate the video is being downloaded or is downloaded.
Use RSS to follow channels
I personally use my own FreshRSS instance. It even has some extensions for youtube (like easy adding url and embeding the video with a link right for download)
I used to use newsblur, but its very heavy, FreshRSS is very light… so light that Garuda could maybe add it as a service… dunno… maybe… @dr460nf1r3
That might be a possibility 
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