Building Cineverse for the Replit 10th Anniversary Buildathons

Building Cineverse for the Replit 10th Anniversary Buildathons

A social network for movie, TV, and anime fans — built end-to-end on Replit.

Why I built this

Most movie sites tell you what to watch. Almost none of them help you talk about what you watched. Letterboxd is great for film snobs, MyAnimeList is great for anime, IMDb is great for facts — but no single home covers movies, TV, and anime together, with friends, lists, reviews, and conversation in the same feed.

I wanted that home. So I built Cineverse.

Cineverse is a social network for movie, TV, and anime fans. You can discover what to watch, follow friends, post reviews, build and share lists, and join the conversation around every title.

A quick tour

A landing page that says “social”, not “streaming”

The hero leads with what Cineverse actually is — a community — and not a generic “watch trending titles” pitch. The badge, tagline, and CTAs all push toward the feed and the sign-up.

Discover movies, TV, and anime in one place

Movies and TV come from TMDB; anime comes from MyAnimeList through Jikan. Every section is filterable by genre, year, language, country, and more, and the entire catalog is cached in PostgreSQL so pages load instantly.

Lists, feeds, and a real social layer

Sign up and you get a profile, a follow graph, a personalized activity feed, custom lists you can share, reactions, comments, and notifications. Everything that happens on a title page (rating, reviewing, adding to a list) shows up in your friends’ feeds.

A blog and a CMS, built in

Cineverse ships with an admin panel, a blog, and a flexible CMS so the site can publish editorial content, run ad placements, and manage homepage sections without redeploying.

How it’s built

Everything runs on Replit, in a single pnpm workspace:

• Frontend — React 19 + Vite, Tailwind v4, Wouter, react-i18next (English + Turkish), Tanstack Query, Clerk for auth.
• API — Express + TypeScript with a typed OpenAPI spec and an auto-generated React Query client.
• Database — Replit’s managed PostgreSQL with Drizzle ORM, plus a cached layer in front of TMDB and Jikan so we never hammer upstream APIs.
• Admin — A full admin panel for users, moderation, sync jobs, settings, homepage sections, featured content, navigation, ads, blog, and CMS pages.
• SEO — A custom Vite middleware that injects per-route titles, descriptions, OpenGraph, canonicals, and JSON-LD at request time, so every title and list page is real-server-side SEO without a separate SSR runtime.

The entire thing — frontend, API, database, jobs, deploys — was built and is hosted on Replit. Replit Agent did most of the heavy lifting: schema design, scaffolding routes, wiring auth, syncing TMDB, even fixing tricky deployment errors like a Vite EISDIR bug caused by a <link rel="canonical" href="/">.

About the Replit Buildathons

This project was made for the Replit 10th Anniversary Buildathons — a celebration of 10 years of Replit and of the people building on it. The Buildathons are about shipping real things in public: pick an idea, build it on Replit, deploy it from the same browser tab, and share what you made with the community.

What I love about building on Replit:

1. Zero setup. No “clone the repo, install Postgres, install Node, copy env vars”. Open the workspace, the database is already there, the dev server is already running.
2. The agent is part of the editor. I describe a feature in plain English, the agent edits the right files, runs typecheck, and tests it. I review and merge.
3. One click to publish. Cineverse went from localhost to a real URL with HTTPS in seconds.

If you’ve been thinking about building something, this is the moment. Open Replit, describe the thing you wish existed, and ship it.

Try it

• 🎬 Live site: https://cineverse.replit.app/
• 💛 Built for: Replit 10th Anniversary Buildathons
• 🛠️ Stack: React + Vite, Express, PostgreSQL, Drizzle, Clerk, TMDB, Jikan
• 🤖 Co-built with: Replit Agent

Happy 10th, Replit. Here’s to the next 10.