In order to get recommendations on your homepage you need to enable your Youtube history in order for videos to be "tailored for you". This is complete BS, as recommendations were perfectly fine before, and I have never had history enabled. This is just a stunt to get people to give their personal data to google. Now I know google has always been bad but this is what really gave me the wake up call, the final straw if you will.
This has prompted me to look for an alternative, specifically an open source alternative. Unfortunately, there are no suitable candidates to my knowledge. However, there is a small, open source alternative which is federated (similarly to Lemmy) called PeerTube. I believe with enough users it could potentially become a viable alternative. Please consider reading more about it. I have not joined yet but I will research more tomorrow. Thanks for hearing me out, just wanted to spread awareness.
It already did this, I'm guessing based on subscriptions or something, but as others have mentioned they probably have my history anyway. It's honestly less about the fact that I can't get recommendations and more about the fact that they are trying to force people to turn on history. But tbh even without this I am happy to have found a federated version similar to Lemmy.