[tuchsen]

I really like you're idea! In fact, I like it so much that I've been working on something very similar at https://lurk.news. I don't have anything released yet though, congrats on getting yours out there, it works pretty well.

I've got a couple of minor bugs to report. The first (very small) bug is that I couldn't sign up with the email address of "accounts (at) lurk.news" because it says that it's invalid. The second bigger issue is that your YouTube search seems to be down? I tried some niche youtubers at first and then just searched for "mr beast" as a sanity check and it doesn't find him.

Are you using the services official API's to find and display content? For Lurk, I wrote an Electron app that opens up websites in the background and then parses the HTML to query for data, then presents that to the user as a unified feed. I figure with it all happening on each client device it'll be very hard for any given website to block it, and that way I can expose an extensions mechanism so that people can scrape whatever they want to get a unified feed of data.

[brianpk]

Thanks! Lurk looks cool too -- similar, but more in a complementary way I think in that users have to click out of Apricot to read/watch/listen to the content vs. how Lurk brings the content into an embedded browser. Looking forward to seeing it in action!

Apricot's search is a mix -- for a couple platforms, I do call the search endpoint. For the others (including YouTube), it's postgres full-text search. It's a starting point, but it doesn't do fuzzy search, even in this limited lexical task. "mr beast" is a good example -- try searching for "mrbeast" (no space) and you should see it.

I like your idea for finding content, I think it makes sense for what you're doing with Lurk. Are you worried about response time, or is it more of an interactive tool for Lurk users?

[tuchsen]

Ah I wish I had more than just a screenshot to show! Lurk works in a very similar way to Apricot from an end users point of view. The scraping of websites happens in the background on the users device, with a bunch of scripts that it ships with to grab data from websites like Reddit and Twitter. You've lit a fire under me to finish though, it's been stuck at that 90% done threshold for too long now. It's just been good enough for me to use, but still way too buggy to release.

If you're scraping Youtube and relying on that index I guess it makes sense that I can't find my niche Youtubers (try "TattooedTraveller"). I don't know how much of an outlier I am in preferring smaller channels, but I would have appreciated a way to add a channel manually. I know that's a big ask though, and hell, don't waste your time on me I've got my own thing anyways :P.

[brianpk]

Oh, you totally can add a YouTube channel (or any other feed) manually - just paste the link into Apricot! For Tattooed Traveler, for example, paste in https://www.youtube.com/@TattooedTraveler.

As you can probably tell, I'm trying the "ship when still a little embarrassed" approach. It stings a bit, but it does get the product out the door...

[tuchsen]

Ah thanks for the tip! And FWIW I think you picked a great time to ship, it's really a great MVP.