When I first got into live streaming, I came across several tools like Streamlabs and StreamElements and similar platforms were good for first starting out. Easy to use and understand and fun to play with. But they also are supported by other ways of monetization like promotions for shitty mobile games, and lean heavily into stream culture¹. When I first started I thought I had to, you know have flashy subscription alerts, and the like. They kind of push you in certain ways on what streaming is. But in reality, that’s not a requirement. The best part of streaming is doing your own thing.

One of the things that StreamElements did ,in addition to a chatbot, was keeping track of emoji usage in chat, as well as hashtags. It was fun to go back and review from time to time to see what was on the leaderboard for the last 90 days.

But StreamElements removed the hashtag tracking, probably due to limitations or restrictions from Twitch. Additionally, StreamElements offer things called Stream Overlays. These are basically overlays you can embed on your stream for alerts (subscriptions, follows, etc.) They also had a credits overlay in their gallery. This would display a set of rolling credits of everyone who was subscribed or followed etc.

But since starting six years ago, the features for StreamElements have pretty much remained the same. The customization was limited, and Twitch started offering their own alert overlays (which are easier to work with). I wanted to do more with the credits.

Could I keep track of hashtags again? Could I keep track of who chatted for this stream? Could I make it more dynamic to show engagement from the chat? Yes. But… no one made such a thing. At least not on MacOS or Linux.

I had come across awesome software projects like Social Stream Ninja which I was using for my chat overlay. But Social Stream Ninja offers a robust… cosmically robust amount of customization and integration via API. Seriously. Steve Seguin the one guy who makes it along with lots of other useful things, is super engaged with his users, and offers all of this free. Best yet, it runs locally² on your computer.

After many vibe coding sessions, I created my own software tailored to my needs. It keeps track of every chat, every activity, hashtags, emojis, etc. It allows customization of rolling credits (you can time them to your outro music).

I started adding other features like other overlays that show the hashtags from the stream in an old school hashtag cloud.

I’ve used it for a few months and it remains pretty stable. But it’s nice to keep track of who donated bits, raided, etc. It keeps track of a lot of stuff, and the data is all in one place on my computer.

It’s not for everyone, but I’m pretty happy with it and decided to publish it as open source on GitHub. You can check it out here: https://github.com/jarbochov/StreamPulse

So give it a look if you want. I made sure the documentation on how to set it up was comprehensive. I’m not sure what other things I would want to add into it. It does have a dependency on SocialStream since it’s already capturing chat information, I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel on that one.

1. LED lighting, youth-trends, “Like, subscribe, follow, ring the bell” but like too much. ↩︎
2. I tend to operate on a local first philosophy these days. ↩︎