Introducing NodeTube, an open-source YouTube alternative powered by NodeJS | Hacker News Reader

Introducing NodeTube, an open-source YouTube alternative powered by NodeJS

nodetube.live

14 pointsmayeaux26 comments

Open source announcement, 18 days ago, over 150 points, over 70 comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926666

Being served by Node.js isn't really a selling point to most people, but I applaud the effort none the less.

It's actually the opposite of a selling point. Node does well against other languages with I/O bound jobs, but throw something CPU-intensive at it and it's not even close to C, C++, Java, or Go.

The app is decoupled such that the frontend can run separately from the intensive processes. I have the app running on a free Heroku dyno right now and it's running great even serving up to 100 concurrent users.

How are you handling the intensive processes and why is it worth having JS in the mix? Why not use one language?

Unrelated: the planned federation is muuuuuch more interesting than the stack you're using.

Yup federation is planned. And JavaScript is the language of the web, JavaScript + Node together is something I really enjoy working with. And intensive things like video conversions is run closer to the metal than the Node app

it's only been 18 days since your show HN post. maybe you can find other places to promote this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21926666

Sorry, I've just been working a lot on the frontend lately and feel that the actual live instance now is about a 1.0 which is my motivation for the post. Hopefully that's OK I know there's a LOT of people who have still never heard about this but find it interesting.

If you want to keep re-submitting maybe consider starting a dev blog where you can explain what's new, instead of just reposting the same thing over and over again with no context.

I did that based on a suggestion before, and wrote up a pretty long blog entry about my motivation for the project and it got like zero pickup on HN. People really like to just see the real thing, here is the post for reference: https://medium.com/@NodeTube_org/my-plan-to-ensure-the-free-...

HN has clear rules about when you are allowed to repost, as people explained to you already when you complained the last time one of your posts got flagged.

The problem was that you reposted it as "Introducing". That's clearly a dupe relative to the Show HN. If you made a post specifically about the differences since the last post, that might be ok, though probably not as a Show HN. It depends on how major the differences are, and how intellectually interesting they are to discuss.

They didn’t promote it. They submitted it. The promotion happened with the upvotes. That being said, if it is such a pain that something that was submitted before was submitted again, I can provide help balancing the universe by not submitting something that was never submitted before. Let me know if that helps.

Honestly it would help me if people just posted the link themselves if they found it interesting. Whenever I do it it's frowned upon for 'self promotion' even though people find it very interesting and useful. Maybe that's the play!

The repost rule doesn't care who posts it.

If I read the rules and ctrl+f for repost I only find: 'Please don't delete and repost the same story. Deletion is for things that shouldn't have been submitted in the first place.'

Which rule are you referencing?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

> Are reposts ok?

If a story has had significant attention in the last year or so, we kill reposts as duplicates. If not, a small number of reposts is ok.

(I had forgotten that was on the FAQ page or I'd have referenced it explicitly - it's a bit weird it's in there)

The link directly to my Github repo received attention, but a post that is to the live instance has yet to receive any significant attention. The two things are separate, one is a source code that hypothetically does something, the other is a legitimate file-hosting platform.

> Your video is currently pending moderator approval. If it's still pending after several minutes please contact a mod at Discord

Hm, that could get terrible pretty quickly.

It's a stopgap measure right now since I only have a couple other mods and can't guarantee someone can be around to monitor uploads. It can be turned off via a flag in the settings file.

Why name it after the language?

It's actually a double entendre, eventually it will be federated via ActivityPub and able to index others instances' content, and that's the other and true meaning of the 'Node' component of the name.

Do you plan on making it compatible with Peertube?

How is this better than PeerTube?

What made you choose NodeJS to power a media streaming platform?

I'm a JavaScript guy and do most of my servers in Node, and was able to use a great repo called 'hackathon-starter' from Github for some basic functionality out of the gate, and I like their setup of a Node app.

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