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Back To Work On Stellicast
I've been developing an ambitious project called Stellicast since December, 2025. Stellicast aims to be the next YouTube, but with privacy before profit. Stellicast won’t share or sell your data to third parties, it’ll let you choose how much data gets tracked (and tracked data only gets used to improve your experience, not to profile you), and you won’t be bombarded with a zillion ads per video, and you won’t be turned away from service if you use an ad blocker or VPN. To learn more, visit the recently updated about page on the beta preview: https://beta.stellicast.com/about.
The update I’m currently working on is the largest update I’ve ever worked on: adding sectors, which is basically subreddits but for a video platform instead of a social media platform. Their individual communities/topics where you can post your videos to, follow the entire sector, or just browse content from exclusively that sector. There will still be a home feed, which in a later update, will take into account which sectors you follow and watch the most. (It doesn’t do that yet because there is no recommendation algorithm yet.)
My favorite feature so far is the Star Map, an interactive galactic map displaying each sector as a literal sector in space, sized by how many members the sector has compared to the largest sector on the platform. Here’s a screenshot of the star map:
The final features remaining are mostly cleanup and polishing, but absolutely necessary for full functionality of sectors. For example, there’s currently no way to manage your sector after creating it. I need to add an admin panel, mod panel, etc. Another example is that you cannot move a video to a sector after uploading it, even if it was uploaded before sectors existed. That needs to change as well, at the very least for videos that existed before sectors. There’s quite a few older videos that belong in a sector that exists now, and many more that belong in sectors that don’t yet exist, but very easily could in the future if someone else decides to create it. Another example of a planned feature for sectors I haven’t implemented yet is for test videos uploaded to s/testing to be automatically deleted after a certain period of time. This is a hugely important feature, as I expect most videos posted in the current stage of the website to be test uploads. Adding this feature will save on storage and bandwidth costs massively, which is extremely important for a project with a $0 budget.
Do you like the vision I have set for Stellicast and think your friends will like it too? Share the website with anyone who you think may be interested! The more public visibility Stellicast gets, the more likely it is to succeed, and I need all the help I can get.
Speaking of help, any and all donations are greatly appreciated, as this website is entirely funded by donations, and as of the writing of this post, I have gotten $0 in donations, but spent more than $0 on the project. Check out my Buy Me A Coffee page here: https://buymeacoffee.com/zytronium