Homebase

The challenge

A streamer who builds an audience on someone else’s platform is renting their livelihood. One policy change, restriction, or ban, and the community, the income, and the archive can vanish overnight. Discovery platforms are brilliant at finding new viewers — and poor at giving a creator anything they actually own.

Homebase began with one creator: Daisy, who streams as Daisy Jones. She wanted a home for her community that she controls, a second income from memberships, and a setup that runs without a technician at her elbow every evening. Most of her viewers watch on phones, in portrait — so the platform had to be built that way, not adapted to it later.

The fit

Homebase is a self-hosted, open-source streaming and community platform. Each creator gets their own branded site and their own live stream, behind invites and memberships, while TikTok stays the discovery engine and Discord becomes the bridge. It is multi-tenant from day one: one shared gateway, with an isolated space per streamer.

Joining is one tap. Daisy shares invite QR codes in her Discord; a viewer scans one and is straight in as a member with a free month — no form, no card, no password. Later they can add an email and a passkey so they never lose access. When paid memberships open, subscriptions go through each creator’s own Stripe account, so the money lands with the creator’s business, not with Homebase.

What it does

• A site per creator — on its own subdomain, in the creator’s brand, with a public “live now” teaser and members-only video and chat
• Portrait-first live streaming — Owncast per creator, 1080×1920 at the source plus a 720p rendition for phones, with low-latency two-second segments
• One-scan invites — printable QR codes by campaign, each single-use and expiring, that start a 30-day free month
• Passwordless sign-in — passkeys or emailed magic links; device sessions the member can see and sign out
• Chat with real names — the member’s Homebase name appears in chat automatically, with moderators appointed by the streamer
• Gated at the edge — every video, chat, and API request is checked against membership before it reaches the stream
• Graceful when things go wrong — a friendly offline card that goes live by itself, and a bounded fallback that keeps current viewers watching through a short outage
• Creator-owned billing (in progress) — tiered monthly memberships through the creator’s own Stripe account; Homebase never holds the money

Under the hood

• Self-hosted with Docker Compose on its own dedicated server — Caddy at the edge, a Python gateway, a small gatekeeper service, PostgreSQL, and one Owncast container per creator
• Tenant isolation enforced twice: by subdomain and by PostgreSQL row-level security
• Server-rendered gateway (FastAPI, Jinja) styled from the Homebase brand system, with WebAuthn passkeys and hashed one-time tokens
• Decisions on record — architecture decision records for tenancy, identity, invites and billing, stream gating, and hosting
• Room to grow — Discord integration, a Luanti game world, and PeerTube, PixelFed, and Mastodon are on the roadmap, with single sign-on via Zitadel planned for that stage

Craft notes

Homebase is designed around the people who actually use it. For viewers, the path from a Discord post to watching live is a single scan, on a phone, held upright. For the creator, who is not technical, the system has to look after itself: secrets applied on every start, auto-restarting services, plain-language offline messages, and a gate that fails safely rather than dropping a live audience. For the business, the hard rule is ownership — the audience, the content, and the subscription income belong to the creator.

Homebase is in development and not yet open to the public. Daisy is the first tenant; a second creator is planned as a beta tester before the platform is offered to other streamers.