Yeah, but this defeats the purpose of being anonymous and not sending your habits and IP to facist america, if you are the only one using that instance, it doesn't give you any anonymity

Then you might just use freetube with local back end

I use a croned service built around yt-dlp and a simple textfile for channels and their options. It saves categorized, correctly cutted, subbed and thumbnailed mkvs for upnp rygel to serve my TVs.

You can find the code here to get started with a usable state:

https://github.com/krei-se/yt-timeshift

Together with mediathekview this creates distraction free content, you can cron symlink all new stuff into another folder, means you open "Whatsnew" and have all fresh content from last week or two sorted.

So far im pretty pleased as the server is on my roaming homes nfs so can pickup the browser cookies from my workstation easily, manually updating them is not really an option.

I would not use a manually run service or frontend though as the query for new videos is not fast, a single run with 50 channels will easily go an hour just to scrape all video lists.

You also have to experiment a lot with sleep parameters to not trigger their bot detection and should autoupdate yt-dlp through the service.

But since it ran stable it continues to do so for months now.