No. 1 · MMXXVI

TELL YOUTUBE WHAT YOU DO NOT WANT. WITHOUT TELLING IT WHO YOU ARE.

Signed out, YouTube gives you no way to say not this. The menu item is gone, the Subscribe button asks for an account, and the home page is blank until its cookies have something on you. Ownfeed is a browser extension that puts those controls back and keeps them on your side of the wire. Every video gets a ✕. Press it and the video is gone for good; block its channel or a word from its title in the same breath. What you hide and what you watch train a small model that ranks a home feed built from channels you follow locally and from what YouTube relates to the things you watched. All of it lives in the extension's storage. There is no server, no account and no telemetry; YouTube sees ordinary signed-out page requests.

THREE WAYS TO SAY NO

The video

Hidden everywhere, for good. Undo is on the panel that replaces it and on the settings page.

The channel

Block channel: …

Offered after every ✕, and marked in red once you have hidden two of its videos.

The topic

Block topic: word

Words from the title, or a phrase of your own. Whole words only: art leaves party alone.

HOW IT BEHAVES

XEVERY LIST. Home, search, the sidebar beside a video, channel pages, and Ownfeed's own cards carry the same ✕.

XIT LEARNS, SLOWLY. One ✕ only nudges look-alikes down. Holding a video back takes two dislikes sharing a couple of words, four on one word, or two on one channel.

XIT SHOWS ITS WORK. Held-back videos are counted under the feed with the words that held them. This one is fine corrects the model.

XWATCHING COUNTS FOR. Thirty seconds of a video weighs its words and channel the other way.

XFOLLOW LOCALLY. A button under every video and on channel pages. New uploads arrive by the channel's public RSS.

XTWO HOME VIEWS. YouTube's cookie-keyed suggestions with your blocks applied, or My feed. A switch at the foot of the page.

XBRING YOUR LIST. Subscriptions import from Google Takeout, OPML, NewPipe and FreeTube. Everything exports as one JSON file.

CHANNELS YOU FOLLOW
│  public RSS
│
│   VIDEOS YOU WATCHED
│   │  what YouTube relates to them
▼   ▼
YOUR SIGNALS ── ✕ videos · channels
│               topics · learned words
▼
MY FEED

nothing on this plate leaves the browser

FIG. 1 — WHERE THE FEED COMES FROM

It is a word model, not a mind reader. Hide Minecraft and it learns minecraft, not games like Minecraft. For the rest there is the topic block.

— LIMITS, STATED PLAINLY

NO ACCOUNT
NO SERVER

INSTALL · FIREFOX 140+

ownfeed-0.1.0.xpi — open it in Firefox and say yes. Signed by Mozilla as a self-distributed add-on, so it stays installed.

# from source, for an evening:
git clone https://github.com/h-3303/ownfeed
# about:debugging → This Firefox → Load Temporary Add-on…
# → pick ownfeed/manifest.json

It is not listed on addons.mozilla.org, so it does not update itself; new versions appear on the releases page. Chromium browsers: unpack the zip from the same page, then chrome://extensions → Developer mode → Load unpacked.

What it asks for, and what it does not do.

Permissionsstorage, and access to www.youtube.com. Nothing else.
NetworkSame-origin requests to youtube.com only: channel RSS, the watch-next endpoint, a channel page when you follow by handle.
StorageThe browser's extension storage. Inspect, remove or erase every item on the settings page.
Channel blocksYouTube's tiles show a channel's name, not its id; a block made from a tile matches by name.
Not an ad blockerIt does not touch ads or playback. YouTube's own player plays the video.
When YouTube changesSelectors follow the markup of September 2026. An end-to-end script in the repo shows which step broke.

SOURCE · github.com/h-3303/ownfeed
RELEASES · signed .xpi for Firefox, zip for Chromium
LICENCE · GPL-3.0 · no build step, plain JavaScript

v0.1.0