MovieBuff

MovieBuff is a web application developed by retiolus that tracks all the movies and TV shows you watch. If you’ve used Letterboxd or Trakt, you might be familiar with the concept.

retiolus first released it on Codeberg late last year and I was immediately interested. I already use Discogs to track my music collection, Listenbrainz for what I listen to, and this was perfect for my watch history. After it hadn’t been contributed to for a few months, I forked it and vibe coded my own version of it (shame on me). I had been looking for a solution to do exactly that, but didn’t want to use something like Letterbox or Trakt - why let them train on my data? I had been posting on my blog what I watched every quarter for 2025 and early 2026 and this fit exactly what I was looking for. Best of all, it was Federated - if you use Mastodon, you could easily follow me and see what I was watching and what I rated.

I love how the README describes the project:

  • A diary, not a database. Every viewing is a dated entry, with an optional half-star grade and a review; watch it again and it is logged again.
  • Films and series in one place, seasons and episodes included, catalogued from TMDB. One search, one profile, one set of shelves.
  • Cast and crew on every title, and a page for each person with their filmography.
  • Series without spoilers. What people say past the episode you reached is folded until you open it.
  • One search box for titles, people, accounts on any server, hashtags and pasted links.
  • Shelves worth browsing — Watched, Watching, Watchlist — sorted and filtered by decade, genre, films or series.

And read the README for more.

About two months ago retiolus updated MovieBuff. Up until then it had only worked with movies, but support for TV shows was then added, as well as a host of new features. A few weeks ago I wiped my version of MovieBuff and installed it from upstream.

The docs have excellent instructions for how to deploy a server. The docs say you need Debian 12 or Ubuntu 24.04, but I succesfully installed it on Fedora 44 with only a few things needing to change, mainly using Valkey instead of Redis and the PosgreSQL Python library needed a newer version than what is in requirements.txt. Other than that, the installation went flawlessly and I even updated to 0.1.1 without issues by following the instructions in the docs.

There are a ton of features, including the ability to make it a progressive web app on your phone or tablet and it feels like a real app on your mobile device.

A big thank you to retiolus for creating MovieBuff. I’ve never self hosted a federated app before and so far so good. If you’re on Mastodon and want to follow me, I’m at @prcutler@moviebuff.silversaucer.com. My instance is also open to sign-ups - if you’re interested in joining, you can register for an account and join the server to track what you watch.