How to whitelist a YouTube channel and block all the others

YouTube is not one thing. It is a handful of channels you would defend, wrapped in a recommendation engine you would not. This is how to keep the first part using Pluckeye, and switch the second part off.

The short version

pluck + block youtube.com video/
pluck + block ytbychannel.com video/
pluck + allow https://ytbychannel.com/RickAstleyYT
pluck delay 4h

Swap RickAstleyYT for whatever appears in the address bar after you paste a link below. Then read on for why each line is there.

Why allowing a channel is harder than it sounds

Pluckeye matches on URLs, and a URL rule covers everything underneath it. That is a clean model, and it works everywhere except YouTube — because YouTube’s URLs are not organised by channel. The channel page lives at youtube.com/@thechannel, but its videos are served from youtube.com/watch?v=…, which is not underneath it. Nothing in the watch URL says whose video it is.

So allow https://www.youtube.com/@thechannel allows the channel’s page, and no video on it. Pluckeye’s own YouTube page documents the two usual ways round this: allow each video URL by hand, which works but means copy-pasting a URL every single time; or use the miniplayer trick, which plays the channel’s videos but will not let you expand them — click to make it bigger and you land on the watch page, which is still blocked.

ytbychannel takes the third option: give the video a second URL that is organised by channel.

youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQytbychannel.com/RickAstleyYT/dQw4w9WgXcQ

Now the channel is a path prefix, and one ordinary allow rule reaches every video under it.

Step 1 — block every video

video/ is a media type: the trailing slash means “every kind of video”. Host rules cover subdomains automatically, so one line covers m.youtube.com and music.youtube.com as well.

# no video anywhere on YouTube
pluck + block youtube.com video/
 
# and none here either, or this site becomes the loophole
pluck + block ytbychannel.com video/

Blocking always takes effect immediately, even when you have a delay set, so these two lines are live the moment you press enter. If you are on the classic base configuration video is already blocked everywhere and you can skip this step — though adding the rules anyway does no harm and makes your intent explicit when you read your config back in six months.

Want the page text gone too, not just the player? Block text/html on YouTube instead, and keep ytbychannel as the only way in:

pluck + block https://www.youtube.com text/html
pluck + block youtube.com video/

Step 2 — find the channel URL

Browse YouTube as normal, copy the link of something you want to watch, and paste it here. Watch links, youtu.be share links, Shorts, live URLs and embeds all work, and a timestamp on the link is carried through.

You will land on ytbychannel.com/RickAstleyYT/dQw4w9WgXcQ with the title and the channel name visible and the player blocked. The channel segment is the channel’s @handle with the @ removed, so it is stable — copy it out of the address bar exactly as it appears, capital letters included.

Step 3 — allow the channel

pluck + allow https://ytbychannel.com/RickAstleyYT

Refresh, and the video plays at full size. Because URL rules cover all sub-URLs, that single rule also covers everything the channel posts in future — you never have to touch it again.

Prefer to be stricter than a whole channel? Allow the video instead. It is one segment deeper, so the rule permits exactly that video:

pluck + allow https://ytbychannel.com/RickAstleyYT/dQw4w9WgXcQ

To take a channel back out, swap the + for a -. Removing an allow rule reduces your access, so it applies immediately:

pluck - allow https://ytbychannel.com/RickAstleyYT

Step 4 — set the delay

Everything above is reversible in a second, which is exactly the problem the delay solves. Set one and any future rule that gives you more access has to wait it out. Rules that take access away stay instant, and so does deleting a channel you regret.

pluck delay 4h
 
# check it later with:
# pluck delay

Add the channels you already know you want before setting the delay, or you will spend your first evening waiting. Lowering the delay is itself an increase in access, so it has to survive the current delay — four hours in, four hours to get back out. That asymmetry is the entire mechanism.

You can also give particular changes their own delay. A day for anything YouTube-shaped, an hour for everything else:

pluck delay 1h
pluck delay 24h "+ allow https://ytbychannel.com/"

Variations worth knowing

Audio only

If you mostly want talks and music, Pluckeye can kill the picture and leave the sound. This rule disables the video container without touching the audio stream:

pluck + block youtube.com selector:.html5-video-container

No thumbnails

Thumbnails are the bait even when the videos are blocked. YouTube serves them from a separate host, so they take a separate rule:

pluck + block i.ytimg.com

Only at certain hours

A when rule restricts a rule to a time window. This one allows your channels on weekday evenings and nothing outside them:

pluck + when MTWRF19-21 allow https://ytbychannel.com/RickAstleyYT

Restricted mode

On a Chromium-based browser Pluckeye can force YouTube’s own moderate or restricted mode, which is a blunt filter but a useful backstop:

pluck + safe
# or, stricter:
pluck + safer

When a video still will not play

Ask Pluckeye what it just did. Verdicts lists recent connection attempts and whether they were allowed:

pluck verdicts
pluck verdicts block   # only the blocked ones
pluck find ytbychannel # what rules do I have for this site?

The delay has not elapsed. The most common cause by far. pluck delay tells you what you set; the rule is queued, not lost.
The channel segment does not match. It is case-sensitive and it is the handle without the @. Copy it from the address bar rather than typing it.
The page was cached. A hard reload, or clearing the browser cache, rules this out.
You are on classic and the thumbnail is missing too. That is the base configuration blocking images, not this rule failing. Allowing the channel path fixes both at once.