I’ve been using invidious for a few years. I recently changed up my morning routine and have been eating breakfast watching YouTube via the TV app versus on my PC.
It made me realize I kind of miss the recommended videos in some circumstances like when I just wanna veg out.
Are there any current viable yt front ends that either maintain the algorithm or utilize their own to find you new content?
I've installed smarttube this week on my tv but I'm having issues with videos not loading or with 403 error ..almost all videos return this error..any ideas about what may be the reason?
Google updated something that broke most third party clients this past week... newpipe had the fix within an evening and the rest followed shortly after.
I had multiple updates over a few days on smarttube beta so the devs must have been working overtime to get it fixed and its working great again now.
Reminder to consider donating to the project if you get use out of it.
Doesn't answer your question directly, but nostr is working on this. Nostr is an open protocol like ActivityPub (which underlies Mastodon and Lemmy). Its main use is as a twitter clone right now, but it also has a very new reddit clone and can theoretically support videos as well. And you can choose your own algorithm. Here's all the choices I get from one of their clients, and there's dozens of nostr clients to choose from. The cool thing is that anybody can make and publish an algorithm and you can subscribe to any algorithm. Your client does all the sorting locally.
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a frontend that uses its own algorithm and using YouTube's one is impossible or money consuming without sacrificing privacy altogether. Open-source algorithms are in a very early stage. I've only heard of 1 or 2 experimental Lemmy or Mastodon local algorithm systems. I think creating one for YouTube is going to be much harder since the content is videos instead of text messages.