NextDNS and Youtube

John A said:
I don't think I had this issue when I first used NextDNS. It just appeared out of nowhere.

 Doesn’t make sense. Filter lists get updates often. 
 

you use also too much lists. Use OISD only and test again. Also stop using nonsense like lists from Chef-Koch which are outdated and doesn’t work anyway. 

I have been struggling with the same problem: when I watched youtube videos on my iPhone, they just wouldn't show up in my watch history, but when I watched them on my Mac in the browser, they showed up just fine. 

Both the Mac and the iPhone are using NextDNS on the same profile, so it didn't occur to me that nextDNS could be causing this. But it turns out it did. One of the Block lists I used (Steven Black), was blocking s.youtube.com and, apparently, the iOS youtube app needs this for the watch history, while youtube.com in a browser does not. It doesn't make much sense, but that's what I can reproduce.

If you understand what's going on, I'd be happy to learn.

To anyone trying to reproduce this: I think, the least you need to do between turning NextDNS or any blocklist on or off is to kill and restart the youtube app. Even when you do that, you may have to wait a bit until some DNS cache is refreshed. So it's a bit confusing, but by checking the logs, I could see that s.youtube.com was being blocked and that when it wasn't blocked, the watch history worked. So I am definitely getting rid of that Steven Black list and will stick to OISD as well as "NextDNS Ads & Trackers Blocklist" but I'm not even sure the latter has anything to add.