How My Painstakingly Made Open Source YouTube-Alternative Became Top Trending On Github NodeTube Follow Jan 3 · 2 min read

Back in 2017 my friend was complaining about YouTube to me, I think purposefully because he knew I did software and knew I was kind of looking for a new project, so I’m sure that had something to do with him constantly bemoaning and laying out all the issues he had with Github. So, one evening not really thinking of anything I finally said ‘what the heck’ and figured I would take a look at how hard it would be to code something up that could look like a YouTube alternative. My first question was how hard it was to serve video, I started poking around and then trying out some implementations and found that browsers were actually quite smart, all you need to do is point them to the source and they will play it pretty well. Well, that was a huge relief to me, and thank Goodness for modern browsers, because it allowed me to get up something pretty quickly just running ngrok. I posted it on my personal Facebook and was surprised and how much it was picked up, I wasn’t the most popular on Facebook but this seemed to have traction with people.

And then a lot of other stuff happened and I had the source code basically done but for a bunch of different reasons it was just sitting there on Github, with nobody even knowing about it. I kind of hoped someone would happen upon it by chance and notice how cool it was and it would go viral but looking back the code needed a bit of TLC first to be easily cloneable so those dreams were definitely misplaced. Then kind of a freak incident happened and it convinced me I needed to get working on my YouTube-alt and finally get it out to the world and then some more things happened (mostly like a three week coding marathon which I’m still in right at this moment) and now it’s January 2, 2020 and my Github project has been trending #1 for the entire world on Github for basically the entire day. Seems crazy to even type but it’s actually true.

Happy to field any questions you may have. And thanks to the mod at r/javascript for recommending I write this. I think it would be remiss to not actually add a link to the source code and also to Github trending for your convenience, hopefully this is within the purview of my permissions for this subreddit and not considered spam.

Source Code: https://github.com/mayeaux/nodetube

Github Trending: https://github.com/trending