Lantizia
commented
1 year ago Logged with NewPipe as well, perhaps in the hope of agreeing on a format together?
Open Lantizia opened 1 year ago
Lantizia
commented
1 year ago Logged with NewPipe as well, perhaps in the hope of agreeing on a format together?
Since some applications (like NewPipe) can't read or amend your Google-hosted YouTube list of subscriptions, and intentionally don't do this for privacy concerns.
It would be great if you could self-host your own list of subscriptions as an encrypted file. Then put this file on something you can self-host yourself like Nextcloud, or use something else like Dropbox or Google Drive instead.
If multiple applications (such as NewPipe and SmartTubeNext) could then read and amend this file... it would allow you to subscribe/unsubscribe from multiple YouTube-compatible apps without storing that subscription information on Google / YouTube servers.
I'm not talking about the ability to manually import or export a subscription list (which things like NewPipe already have), this would need to be automatically synchronized.
It'd be very similar to how people can already host their own encrypted files for passwords (e.g. KDBX files, used by KeePass clients) or bookmarks (e.g. XBEL files, used by floccus and other bookmark sync clients).
A common encrypted file format would have to be agreed though.
This could be something as simple as a JSON file that is added to an encrypted 7z or zip archive (both support encryption, zip files can apparently use AES)... e.g. youtube-subscriptions.json.7z or youtube-subscriptions.json.zip ... and that way, someone who knows the password, could easily open, read, and edit it from any normal desktop.
If such a thing existed, you could unsubscribe from all channels (at least from Google's perspective) and keep the information they have on you to a minimum.
Additionally the file could also store which videos you have watched or not (or partially watched and up to which timecode). That way you can swap between applications (either different installs of NewPipe or SmartTubeNext or between them) and still keep a track of what you have or haven't watched... much like the native YouTube app and website can do.
Note: I originally raised this on reddit if people are looking for more views on this...
https://www.reddit.com/r/NewPipe/comments/123dpnl/selfhost_your_own_list_of_subscriptions/