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by Jolter 1071 days ago
Probably because it’s fast, scales well in terms of size, and decently easy to build apps around. Shouldn’t the question be, why not?
2 comments

Why not?

Well, if you're self hosting for yourself, friends, and family.. it isn't likely to be a thing you'll want to care about fixing when it eventually breaks in mysterious ways.

Better to use sqlite or just a blob of yaml in a file if self hosting might be involved.

Sure, you’re hosting a few hundred or thousand videos, a blob of yaml can be good enough. I have no history if this project, but I suspect they started out like that. Something like Elasticsearch usually comes into play when you are ingesting a lot of data point very quickly, so I would assume the authors wanted to archive fairly huge amounts of videos.
Maybe I misunderstood this but why does a personal youtube listing / downloading app need ES ? Seems so heavyweight for such a lightweight use.
It can do full text search (subtitles, comments) right in the ui. It seems to be designed for large scale backups. I use it for a couple hundred important to me or likely to be removed videos and it works excellent, too.

Would have preferred a more unsurprising db like psql or SQLite for my usage, but they also support data dumps so if needed I can escape.

ES is just a Java-based server, isn’t it? Looks like it clocks in at 500MB which is on par with an Electron desktop app.