Yes! uYouPlus is amazing although it can be a pain to install because of Apple’s shenanigans. It’s a collection of patches over the official YouTube app

It’s Alex Unemployment’s archnemesis.

It would also be prone to recreating the SEO mess that we can see today

I think federation should solve that though?

Ah, yeah you’re probably right my bad. Big data isn’t my speciality so I can’t say much about that :/

No. If you want to run an algorithm you should run it on your computer and not on somebody else’s.

Ignoring the fact that having a proper recommendation AI for every single user would be environmentally disastrous, it would also place much more burden on the ones hosting instances. Keep in mind that most instances are hosted by people who do not earn anything from them and that many bigger instances already had to rent bigger servers because of the influx of people. Adding computationally expansive algorithms in the mix would just increase the cost for the volunteers on top of signing the death of some smaller instances run on a tight budget.

It would also be prone to recreating the SEO mess that we can see today on social medias like youtube where, if you want to grow your community, satisfying the algorithm becomes more important than the actual content of your posts.

However, I would have no issues with an algorithm that a user of an instance could run on their devices and tweak to their liking. This solution would probably be less convenient but would avoid most of the mess.

EDIT: Sorry if my comment came out as too aggressive and thank you for making this post. I think that’s an important issue to discuss and, as thanks for bringing it up, you have my upvote :)