I’m building OpenWatch, an open-source self-hosted video platform as an alternative to YouTube. It’s designed for content creators who want to back up their content on their own infrastructure (in case of strikes) or for anyone who wants a personal video hosting solution.
The project is in early stages, but I’ve built out some core features:
- Home feed
- Video player with adaptive streaming
- Playlists
- Interactions (likes, comments, subscriptions)
- Creator Studio (dashboard, content management, channel customization)
Tech stack:
- Next.js 16
- Tailwind CSS v4
- Drizzle ORM (PostgreSQL)
- FFmpeg
- HLS.js
- Zustand
- Docker
GitHub: https://github.com/openwatch-app/openwatch
Feedback would be helpful, especially around self-hosting considerations and features you’d find useful.
Doesn’t matter there we’ll never be a replacement for YouTube the cost is to great. Think of the storage they barely remove videos they just stay up there.
Decentralized video streaming? Like torrenting but encrypted traffic from disparate nodes like Storj? Not that tech, but something in that vein.
Also how Tor works but that would be slow af.
🤔💭
That’s how peertube works for streaming (not storage), with P2P
Yea someone argued that “it’s not impossible to replace YouTube, [x] also stores massive amounts of videos” where I don’t remember what x was, but I’m fairly sure their massive amounts of videos is less than what gets uploaded to YouTube in a day, maybe an hour.