peter
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The funnel's common ordering made a person open TWO messages: one saying their access was approved, another asking them to confirm their address. The approval mail now branches on what they actually still have to do — carry the confirmation link, point at sign-in, or say a confirmation mail follows once they register — so the usual case is one mail and one click. A mail that guesses wrong is worse than a plain one: telling someone to sign in while their address is unconfirmed contradicts the screen that will refuse them. That embedded link lives 7 days rather than the usual 24 hours. Nobody sits waiting for an approval — it can easily be read on Monday after a weekend, and an expired link spends the one-mail promise and puts them back on two. The risk is small: the token only ever confirms an address; it signs nobody in and sets no password. The most likely root cause of the 2026-09-03 report that a confirmation mail "never arrived" is here too, and it was never a delivery failure: re-registering an address that already had an unconfirmed account returned in SILENCE — same cheerful "check your inbox", no mail sent at all. It now re-sends the link. Nothing new leaks: the response and its timing are unchanged, and the public verify/resend already does exactly this for the same input. Whitelisting stays silent, and that is a decision, not an omission. The operator opens a door as a possibility — usually already agreed with the person — and a row can sit approved for weeks with nobody registering; a mail fired automatically there would be nudging someone who never asked. Telling them is its own act on its own button, `invited_at` records it so a second click is a decision rather than an accident, and the button only appears where nobody is behind the address yet: "the door is open, come in" is meaningless to someone already inside. Two things UAT caught that no test would have. Every fresh registration appeared in BOTH admin lists at once, because the stuck-sign-ups filter keyed on "unconfirmed" — the rule is now "the address may sign in, and this account still can't", which leaves an undecided request with the queue that owns it. And the invitation button was offered on every approved row, half of which are existing users. Also: the confirmation mail finally says what its link's rules are (once, 24 hours) — the reset mail always has, while this one left the reader to discover both by meeting a dead link. The card's "didn't get the email?" moves up under the form, and the three waiting messages name the spam folder, which is where a first message to a fresh recipient sometimes lands. Registration now records the language the sign-up page was in. Nothing reads it yet — the bilingual templates are S7 — but it is the only moment that choice exists anywhere the server can see, and a preference nobody recorded cannot be backfilled later. UAT on localdev: re-registering re-sent the link (one token became two, one account); approval issued a 7-day token and moved the account into the stuck list with only a re-send; whitelisting mailed nobody; the invitation recorded itself and the row then warned that sending again would write twice. Test data removed.
Siftlode
Your YouTube subscriptions, the way a feed should work. Siftlode pulls every upload from the channels you follow into one clean, filterable feed — no algorithm deciding what you see, and no Shorts or livestream noise unless you want it. Self-hosted, multi-user, and private: your data stays on your own server.
Everything expensive (channels, videos, metadata) is fetched from YouTube once and stored locally, so filtering, searching and sorting are instant and don't burn API quota. Click a video to watch it in an in-app player that resumes where you left off — or open it on youtube.com so your own ad blocker and SponsorBlock keep working.
Features
- A readable subscription feed — sort and filter by channel, tag, language, topic, length, upload date or watch state; hide channels without unsubscribing; save filter setups as named views.
- Search all of YouTube from the feed — live results you can play, save or add to playlists like any other video; they stay temporary and out of your catalog unless you keep one.
- Channel pages & a channel manager — per-channel stats and uploads, priorities, and your own tags to slice the feed by.
- Playlists with two-way YouTube sync — build them locally, keep them in sync in both directions.
- In-app player with resume, plus keyboard/scroll controls.
- Download Center — save videos to the server with yt-dlp in a Plex-friendly layout (format presets, per-user storage quota), trim / crop / split & join them in a built-in editor, then save to your device, share with another user, or hand out a public watch link.
- Plex library (optional) — point Siftlode at your own Plex server to browse and play its movies and shows alongside your feed, with watch state kept in sync.
- Multi-user with per-user private state, a shared catalog, and a fair daily API-quota guard.
- Self-hosted & private, with a first-run web setup wizard and the interface in English and Hungarian.
Quick start (self-hosting)
You don't need to build anything — Siftlode runs from a prebuilt public image, and all configuration (your admin account, Google sign-in, email) happens in a first-run web wizard. You need Docker with the Compose plugin.
1. Get the files and run the installer:
git clone https://git.b1fr0st.eu/peter/siftlode.git
cd siftlode
./install.sh # Windows (PowerShell): ./install.ps1
The installer generates a private .env (secrets), pulls the image, starts the app + database, and
prints a one-time setup URL like http://localhost:8080/setup?token=….
2. Finish in your browser. Open that URL and follow the wizard:
- Admin account — the email + password you'll sign in with.
- Google sign-in (optional) — paste a Google OAuth client to enable "Sign in with Google" and pulling your YouTube subscriptions. Skip it to use email + password only.
- Email / SMTP (optional) — for verification/notification emails. Skip it and you (the admin) simply approve new accounts yourself.
Then sign in with your admin account. That's it. See docs/self-hosting.md for the full walkthrough.
Just trying it out? Press Enter at the installer's URL prompt to run on
http://localhost:8080.
Build from source (alternative)
Prefer to build the image yourself instead of pulling it:
git clone https://git.b1fr0st.eu/peter/siftlode.git
cd siftlode
cp .env.example .env
# generate the two secrets and paste them into .env:
python -c "import secrets;print('SECRET_KEY='+secrets.token_urlsafe(48))"
python -c "import base64,os;print('TOKEN_ENCRYPTION_KEY='+base64.urlsafe_b64encode(os.urandom(32)).decode())"
docker compose up --build -d # builds from the included Dockerfile
Open http://localhost:8080 and finish in the setup wizard as above. (Set a POSTGRES_PASSWORD in
.env too.)
HTTPS / public access
Port 8080 over plain HTTP is fine for a LAN or a quick trial. For public access put a reverse
proxy (Caddy, Nginx, Traefik…) in front to terminate TLS, and set the public URL (the installer
prompt, or OAUTH_REDIRECT_URL in .env) to your https://… address — this also marks the session
cookie secure. Add that same …/auth/callback URL to your Google OAuth client's authorized redirect
URIs. Behind a proxy, also set TRUSTED_PROXY_IPS so the rate limiters see the real client IP and
can't be bypassed via a forged X-Forwarded-For — see docs/self-hosting.md.
Updating & backups
docker compose -f docker-compose.selfhost.yml pull # or: docker compose pull
docker compose -f docker-compose.selfhost.yml up -d
Database migrations run automatically on startup. Your data (accounts, subscriptions, playlists, the
video catalog) lives in a Postgres volume — back it up with scripts/backup.sh (or backup.ps1 on
Windows) and restore with scripts/restore.sh.
How it works
- Shared catalog, private state. Channels and videos are stored once and shared; each user's subscriptions, tags, playlists and watch/save/hide state are private.
- Cheap by design. Public reads are cached locally; a shared daily quota budget and a background scheduler keep unattended syncing within YouTube's free API limits. An optional API key lets backfill run without depending on a user's OAuth token.
Tech
FastAPI + PostgreSQL (SQLAlchemy, Alembic) backend; React + Vite + Tailwind + TanStack Query frontend; packaged as a single Docker image with Docker Compose.
Note
This project is developed with AI assistance.