Introducing Nickel

Long story short, there aren't any video platforms that I want to use or that want me as a customer, so I made my own.

The inspiration

Vimeo is best suited for small businesses, filmmakers, and agencies. The only other realistic option? YouTube…which is a Google product and I've been largely anti‑Google for at least a decade. At the top of this year though, I ended my anti‑Google stance to not only create a Gmail account, but create a new YouTube channel as well. The idea was that I'd just use them to grow my personal brand or whatever but that felt gross. I cringed every time I logged in.

Around the same time, I remembered reading an article1 where someone had a ton of video they were storing with Cloudflare and paying pennies. I finally re‑read the article and got the confidence to try it out for myself. The idea of having my own video platform always felt like an impossible dream, just out of reach. Not anymore, I did it!

https://nickel.video/77C015N7N2N3[2]

Few things to note: most of the site isn't done; internal links will show a nice "404, I'm working on it" message and the site is NOT responsive. This is for two reasons:

I wanted to use this immediately

I need to get over needing projects to be "perfect" before launching them

My personal deadline was the launch date of Nintendo Switch 2 because I wanted to film an unboxing video. My son was a persistent micro‑manager during this time of immense frustration because guess what? Everything worked in development but not on my server…WTF?!!

What went wrong

I develop on an M1 Max MacBook Pro with 32GB of RAM. Transcoding a 700MB video is fast af. Deciding to do so on a server with 2GB of RAM and watching my app crash again and again for no obvious (at the time) reason was excrutiating. What I know NOW is that the large video was being kept in memory and when memory fills up, a computer will crash. I had to learn how to chunk the video from my app and stream its parts to my transcoder before reassembling said parts so the transcoding could actually occur before sending those bits to Cloudflare R2.

WHEW!

Switch 2 launched June 5th and I wasn't able to get my unboxing video onto Nickel until 5 or 6 days later…not terribly bad because I literally didn't know what I didn't know. I thought the 4GB Linode that's currently running my transcoder was good enough but I think I'll upgrade that to 8GB before I get my initial group of VIPs to find edge cases for me.

Oh yeah, one of the avoidable issues I ran into was forgetting to install ffmpeg and wondering why the transcoder API wouldn't run LOL! Man, I felt like such a dummy.

What went well

I'm having a blast figuring things out TBQH. Much of how the internet works remains a mystery to me, until I'm forced to learn something to develop a feature.

For example, blob3 URLs! They look more professional than having your CDN or raw playlist files be exposed in your video source tag. Transcoding is neat too! It basically creates several versions of your source video in different resolutions so you can serve video based on available bandwidth. I've gotta optimize my ffmpeg config some more to optimize for size, although I want to prioritize quality.

Designing the video player took a few tries. I tried using Plyr4 first but when I found that serving HLS content was proving difficult with it, I found the great hls-video-element and media-chrome 5 libraries. Fan‑freaking‑tastic libraries, they make themeing a breeeeeze.

I made the video player add context when embedded6 versus being on the site (you can see the title and username of the creator, along with a "NICKEL" button that'll take you to the video on the site). I haven't quite managed to get video to preview within Apple Messages or Discord but it seems like you need to be whitelisted to make that happen anyway. Nickel won't get that entitlement for quite some time (I thought adding Twitter meta tags would work but they don't so I'll remove them from the codebase in the next update).

Speaking of updates, I thought I'd also record a video of me talking about the latest changes coming to Nickel and post under the official account there. Ya gotta dogfood your projects!

The future

I've yet to setup a blog for Nickel so the next update or two about it will likely be here on my personal blog as I get basic site functionality done. I'm currently working on the pricing page and will get that responsive before fixing the rest of the ancillary pages.

It was important for me to have a plan for sustainability because as we've all seen, ad‑supported always devolves into the worst possible experience for everyone who isn't an advertiser.

It is my hope that Nickel can become the home of short‑form video for at least 100,000 people; creators and the people that support them. Stay tuned!

🕸️

P.S.: For the tech stack nerds, nothing's changed. I'm using Gel, Deno, GraphQL, and SvelteKit (Typescript and Sass) on Linode.