Using #dtube-playlistname as tags to group videos into playlists.

While implementing playlists for DTube in a regular way is pretty much impossible due to no backend, I was thinking about a way to do it and this is what came to my mind.

How to make it a smooth experience for authors?

If frontend javascript on the author's end could automatically put this tag into a video whenever the author tells it to, then we could later easily fetch every video with this tag, as long as it was posted by the author, and group them into a playlist so they can play one after another. Videos can be removed from a playlist any time by editing the tags they are posted under. Old videos can also be added to the playlist by updating their tags.

Alrernatively, you just tell the authors how to add a playlist under the tags field on the posting page.

This way we don't actually store anything on the blockchain but the tag. We do all the fetching on our frontend, just like you would with fetching someone's feed.

Why is that good?

This would help maintain long-term series of videos because they wouldn't be all over the place on the author's channel. Sadly, this way of implementing playlists doesn't allow users to create playists with videos of other authors because it's impossible to add tags to other people's post.

It's also the only way playlists can work without using a database.

Challenges and why they aren't very challenging.

This method requires the author to only have access to 3 tags on top of #dtube and #dtube-playlistname. That being said, playlistname is not required on the post and will only be added if the author wanted to put his video into a playlist. This should discourage people from putting everything into a single playlist.

Sharing names for playlists could seem like a challenge, but it's not - we only fetch and display the posts that have the author that we want to show. Even if there's 10 different authors posting in #dtube-foo, DTube will only display 1 author's playlist on his channel. Going to a different channel will result in showing a different playlist. Steemit, busy and other interfaces will still display all the posts like a normal tag would.

Creating a custom fetching system could be a challenge, but since you can already check all posts of a given user by just checking their @username, fetching all of their posts, then fetching all of posts under the #tag and finding matches should be easy enough.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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