[mattivc]

I have had a love-hate relationship with YouTube for a long time. On the one hand, many channels put out great content that I want to watch. But the recommended videos feature is exceptional at hooking into my reptilian brain and getting me to waste a lot of time on junk that I later regret as a big waste of time.

I looked into a lot of alternative clients, including FreeTube, in an attempt to solve this. I use Tube Archivist[1], an open-source project that allows you to subscribe to and auto-download YouTube channels and playlists or download individual videos and watch them in a minimal web interface. It works fine on iOS as long as you set it up to download in an iOS-compatible format. I currently have it running in a Docker container on my Synology NAS.

[1] https://www.tubearchivist.com/

[vanderZwan]

Darnit, I already wrote the rest of the comment below before noticing the "iOS" part of your comment. These are all Firefox add-ons for the desktop. Still, I'll post them in case they're useful to anyone else.

I use the unhook add-on for that, it removes all recommended videos:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...

There's also clickbait remover to get rid of those obnoxious thumbnails:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clickbait-rem...

youtube-audio lets you disable the video-feed. Nice when you're using it to listen to what are basically podcasts and you don't want to waste bandwidth:

https://github.com/animeshkundu/youtube-audio

And while we're here, SponsorBlock skips sponsored segments:

https://sponsor.ajay.app/