At any given time on https://twitch.tv, the livestreaming capital of the internet, there are thousands and thousands of streamers playing games, making music, or just hanging out with an audience, talking and relaxing with friends. However, there are also thousands of streamers with nobody watching them – they are, in effect, screaming into the digital void; some are hoping for viewers to watch and like what they see, becoming regular subscribers while others just broadcast out of boredom.

I think there’s something fun and beautiful about being a stream’s only viewer; it’s oddly intimate to convert a lonely stream into a conversation. There used to be a great site to help you do this (Lonely Streams) but it is sadly defunct. My mental health hasn’t been great lately and enjoying the company of strangers like this always helps, so I built my own replacement: https://nobody.live.

On https://nobody.live you will be tuned into a random stream with zero viewers. Some are boring but some are a lot of fun and you get a chance to make a new friend.

Making the backed for this was fun; I dipped my toes into Redis to do the stream storage which I grossly but effectively accomplished by tearing through the Twitch Streams API until I get to a page (~1000reqs later) with zero-viewer streams on it and then throw into redis for the Flask frontend to serve. Even though my stream scanner scans through search results as fast as possible and loops continuously, I don’t even scratch the surface of Twitch’s rate limiting which was a nice surprise.

Tune in and make a new friend :)