Where the videos come from
vids.today aggregates videos from the PeerTube federated network — about 1,700 public instances listed at instances.joinpeertube.org. PeerTube is the software each instance runs; this site doesn't host any video itself. Playback streams directly from the source instance using its HLS manifest (with WebRTC peer-swarming via p2p-media-loader where the source instance's tracker accepts it).
A background worker polls each instance's public REST API
(GET /api/v1/videos?sort=-publishedAt&count=50) on a 30-minute
rotation, dedupes across federated copies, and stores the metadata.
The same video showing up on five instances is collapsed to a single row.
Ranking
Hot uses Reddit's classic hot algorithm:
a log-scaled engagement signal added to a linear time term. Engagement
is likes + 3 × comments — comments cost more effort than likes,
so they weigh more. Views are deliberately excluded; they're
trivially inflated by autoplay and scrapers (including our own player).
Today ranks videos from the last 24 hours by raw engagement only — no time decay within the window.
New is strict reverse-chronological.
Language detection
The language dropdown is driven by per-video detection (whatlanggo) on the title plus description, after stripping URLs and bracketed IDs that swamp the n-gram statistics. The uploader's own language tag is ignored — it's wrong too often (English videos tagged Danish, that kind of thing). When detection isn't confident enough we leave the language empty rather than committing to the wrong one.
NSFW
Videos flagged NSFW by their uploader are filtered out entirely and never appear in any view.
Contact
Bugs, takedowns, or hi: josh@fireflop.com
vids.today is a personal project, no ads, no accounts, no tracking. The aggregator code is small; if you want a copy, ask.