Grayjay Desktop App

The best feature of alternative YT clients IMO is "multiple subscription lists". I have so many subscriptions, when using the official YouTube app or site the "subscriptions" feed is overwhelming, and I prefer not to use the algorithmically-generated "home" feed. Since YT has kind of become the de facto "place to upload videos on the Internet", video topics are broad enough to constitute multiple web sites, and I like to be able to filter channels by topic rather than having them all grouped together.

If you're opposed to using a separate app just for this, you can achieve something similar using an RSS reader and YT's official RSS feeds (which I'm surprised they still publish tbh).

Great point. There are many yt channels that I would subscribe to if yt had multiple subscription lists. Channels I find interesting, but not enough so that I want them to "clog up" my main subscription channel.

Reddit had the same issue not too long ago. I remember a popular post where a user described their workaround of creating an account for each field of interest. To Reddit's credit, they did implement custom feeds not to long after, which lets you group batches of subreddits. Not something I'd expect YouTube to do.

Did you know that YouTube used to have this exact feature? It was called subscription collections and they publicly promised that they would replace that feature with something better when they removed it. That never happened. It's been 9 maybe 10 years since they said that. [1]

The removal of that feature was an intentional push to take away user agency and push them into using YouTube's recommendation algorithm. The lying was a way to misdirect user complaints until it was too late.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38101629#38104494

freetube has multiple subscription lists. they call it profiles. any channel can be in multiple profiles of your choice.

Never trust the platform. User sovereignty or bust.

Yup. I really liked that feature, but hey who cares about user preferences. the only thing that matter is engagement metrics. it's not like there's any real competition to YouTube you can run to. and the hunt for ad-blockers is getting fiercer.

my workaround to getting different topics separated have been to have multiple YouTube channels inside a single account, each with separate likes/sub channels/recommendations etc. one per Firefox container.

I can still save multireddits. Did they remove that on new.reddit.com ? Try https://old.reddit.com/r/multihub/

Shh.