boltstream VS CardOverflow

Several years ago I cobbled together all the pieces to make a live video streaming website [1] like Twitch.tv, et al. It's impossible to actually run at any kind of scale without being an ISP or Google-scale peer. Not to mention the enormous amount of DMCAs when people are trying to stream live sports, Pay-per-view, etc.

It was fun to play with it for a couple months. But there's no business here. Twitch.tv is also finding that out.

[1] https://github.com/benwilber/boltstream

I built Boltstream [0] over the course of a couple years and got burned out. I wouldn't say it was actually a failed project because in the back of my mind I never really had any intention of trying to turn it into a Twitch/YouTube/Facebook Live competitor anyway. And it's proven to be somewhat popular on Github. The project was fun to build and learn about but ultimately it was impossible to actually run it as a consumer-facing website. The problems were never the actual software/video streaming tech, but rather the extreme bandwidth costs of live video streaming, and the content itself. I launched it several times under different site names/products and it always just turned into a cesspool of pirate streaming live sports and other copyrighted content. The DMCA notices were regular, but were never really that onerous to deal with. Just turn the stream off, ban the account, and then reply to the email. But it just got too annoying. I built a little mobile web app so I could just do it from my phone while I was out at dinner. After awhile I just decided that it was time to give it to someone else to play with. So I did a big code dump on Github and haven't touched it since.

I've actually started working on it a little bit more recently since it seems that "self hosted video streaming" is still pretty in-demand. I'm probably not going to be spending too much time on the actual features and functionality since that's pretty much done at this point. Mostly just packaging it up so it's easier for people to run it themselves and hack on it.

[0] https://github.com/benwilber/boltstream

I tried to build StackOverflow for flashcards (i.e. spaced repetition with collaboration as a first class feature.) After working on it on nights/weekends for ~2 years, I realized my architecture was shit. I started out with Blazor + F# + PostGres, but eventually I realized that syncing offline client DBs to the cloud was a very nontrivial problem. So I moved to event sourcing. Turns out that's not much better - I started to write my own IndexedDB wrapper, then said "you're a moron" and switched to CouchDb/PouchDb/RxDB. I also wanted to support plugins. I thought I figured that out with Blazor, but eventually I realized that more powerful plugins would want to manipulate the DOM directly. Blazor's virtual DOM kills that possibility. So, I'm off the dotnet ecosystem (I can't express how very, very sad I am to leave F#) and onto Typescript + SolidJS. I would've gone ReScript but that's tightly coupled to React which uses the VDom. Perhaps I should be using Svelte - I'm not solid on any of this new architecture yet. So my project has not yet entirely failed... I just realized I spent ~2 years on the wrong architecture.

The carcass of my attempt in dotnet: https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow

FWIW I'm building something from the ground up that'll have this sharing/social thang built in. I also (obviously) think that there's a need for collaborative tools for building and sharing cards, along with perhaps ways to publish your progress. For various reasons I'm not building it on Anki though.

I'm building the above thing here: https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow

Not only considered - I'm actively using it. You'll find people complaining about IndexedDB's API all over the internet. They're right - it's remarkably terrible. I'm using Dexie.JS as a wrapper over it.

I'm working on an open source edtech website. Prelaunch, but I wouldn't mind talking shop. In the western suburbs.

My dude, speaking as someone who gets really happy when they find a functor in their code, I fully disagree with your last paragraph. You can do FP without knowing anything about the theory. Telling someone that they should read up on a dry, boring academic topic in order to be a better programmer is kinda a nonstarter. When you start throwing around stuff like "You should learn category theory and homotopy theory to really understand FP" only drives people away - it doesn't inspire curiosity (in most people).

I'm working on an edtech thing - think StackOverflow/Wikipedia for flashcards. Basically, there's a way to remember an exponential amount of information - it just isn't popular because the existing software is terrible. Despite the terrible software, it is very popular among med students, since they have to cram so much info into their heads.

> I also hate that the anki shared decks web site does not encourage collaboration...

Dude, I'm building exactly this. I'm not basing it on git for various reasons, but I am using event sourcing, and git is basically event sourcing for code. My system will (eventually) allow pull requests, comments, upvotes/downvotes, and all kinds of community shenanigans on flash cards. It's months away from release... but here's the repo if you wanna have a look: https://github.com/dharmaturtle/cardoverflow

Here's another link that I recently saw about something related which is most likely not interesting for you. Just in case: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/nalar8/open_source_web_port_of_anki/ which is about https://github.com/dharmaturtle/CardOverflow

OK, found https://github.com/dharmaturtle/CardOverflow