SubFeed — the YouTube subscriptions tab YouTube buried

Why this exists

YouTube's Subscriptions tab used to be the front page. Two clicks from the home screen, every video from every channel I'd asked to follow, in order. That was the deal: I subscribe, you show me what they posted.

Sometime around 2019 the algorithm took over. The home page became a recommendation feed. The Subscriptions tab moved under a hamburger menu, then under a "More" item, then started getting "watched" markers that hide videos I haven't actually watched. The feed I asked for — by clicking "subscribe" — is now harder to find than the feed YouTube wants me to look at.

I want the original deal back.

What it does

A single screen. The list of channels I subscribe to, in reverse chronological order of their latest upload. Thumbnails. Titles. Channel name. Upload time. Click → the video.

No recommendations. No Shorts. No category tabs. No "you might also like." No algorithmic anything.

A keyboard shortcut to jump to the next channel. A toggle to hide videos I've already opened. A simple "channels with 0 uploads in 30 days" prune list, so I can drop dead subscriptions.

That's the entire app.

How it's built

• YouTube Data API v3 (or RSS per channel — works without a key).
• OAuth on first run to read the user's subscription list.
• Frontend-only after that — fetch, sort, render. Everything in localStorage.

The hard part is rate limits. The YouTube API has a daily quota, so the app caches aggressively and refreshes in the background, not on every load.

What it isn't

Not a YouTube replacement. Not a video player. The video opens on YouTube; this app is just a navigation surface.

Not a recommendation engine. The whole pitch is the absence of one.

Why it doesn't exist yet

Multiple people have built this — RSS-based YouTube feed readers exist, browser extensions exist, Piped/Invidious exist. The angle worth shipping isn't another reader; it's the design of the thing — a Subscriptions tab as an opinionated, single-purpose, beautiful surface, not a dev's RSS dump.

I haven't shipped it because designing one screen is the entire job, and one-screen apps live or die on their layout. I want to take the time to get the typography and density right, and that hasn't happened yet.