Proton - Mail, VPN, Calendar, Passwords, Notes

PBS - Gotta support public broadcasting.

The Satanic Temple - Helping support women’s rights, religious rights, compassion.

Usenet - Cheaper and better content than streaming services

I am technical, but here’s the installation for Owncast

curl -s https://owncast.online/install.sh | bash

https://owncast.online/quickstart/installation/

That’s it. The rest is handled from a website front end like Twitch’s. But yes, it’s more than Twitch.

I switched. :-). People on Reddiy used to tell me no one would switch to Lemmy. Also look at Mastodon.

I also know some streamers that stream to both Twitch and their Owncast. To each their own. It’s here if folks become interested. Most don’t even know a self hosted option exists.

Anyone for Owncast here besides me? :-D

!owncast@lemmy.world

Honestly it’s probably the easiest install I’ve ever done. :-D Don’t hesitate to ping me on Lemmy or on Matrix or where ever if you have any issues, questions, etc. :-)

Yes, my understanding of anything on the web is that it’s STILL just files that are broken up and sent to you.

https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/video/what-is-streaming/

Streaming is the continuous transmission of audio or video files from a server to a client. In simpler terms, streaming is what happens when consumers watch TV or listen to podcasts on Internet-connected devices. With streaming, the media file being played on the client device is stored remotely, and is transmitted a few seconds at a time over the Internet.

I reserve the right to be wrong about EVERYTHING! :-D

If you’re interested, just go check out the directory. Go watch someone. See if anything strikes your fancy. :-) https://directory.owncast.online/

I’m not trying to sway your opinion in the least. It’s not for everyone in the least. I’m just trying to help folks realize there is a REAL alternative to the big platforms. We ARE talking on an open platform Reddit. ;-)

On that $8/month VPS I think at the time I had 2 qualities. 1080 5kbps was the 70+ open streams. I don’t expect “big streamers” to join Owncast soon if ever. But if they do, I imagine they have MORE than enough money to be able to afford a CDN or S3. We’re not talking MILLIONS per months. I don’t think even think we’re even talking thousands, hundreds probably. But yes. You make a good point. And sadly it’s the point that everyone instantly comes up with WHY folks shouldn’t use Owncast. I personally just try to create a welcoming community for anyone interested in trying Owncast. As time goes on those costs of tech continue to go down. If you’re running a server from your house, unless you have a datacap, then you don’t even need to worry about cost of bandwidth, obviously infrastructure does matter though.

As far as CDNs go, streams are just bunches of files. Your player goes out, grabs some files, and you watch it. So a CDN works for vidoe streams like anything else and I almost guarantee that Twitch leverages CDNs as well.

You could do the same with a S3 bucket as well. So if the CDN is too expensive (I honestly don’t know the prices), you could do a S3 bucket.

I have about 12 folks watching me on average at this point. Still better than I had on Twitch. :-) But also, this is MY page. I’ve tweaked the CSS to make it look more like mine. I can show what I want, I don’t have to jump through hoops to keep up with Twitch’s algorithm, I don’t have to show ads, my page doesn’t take 20 seconds to load because it’s loading all kinds of junk in the background. I love it personally. It’s mine. :-)

There are numerous folks that dual stream, I don’t know how folks do that. But I have some friends in Owncast that are in Matrix as well that could tell you. Ety (Owncast: https://ety.cybre.stream/) does exactly that.

I don’t personally agree. Again, I’ve had 70+ connections open at one time and when I estimated the cost of bandwidth, I wouldn’t even hit my monthly budget that Hetzner gives me for “free”. But Owncast has S3 and CDN support built in if you really need to handle something like that.

While I game, others play music, others show movies, there are even churches that use it to broadcast their mass, public broadcasting, etc. It’s fun imo. :-)

Oh yes! Integrates with the Fediverse and announces to the Fediverse. I’m all about open and interoperable platforms.

We can thank US Government for FORCING these companies to allow you to freeze your credit report. It used to be a state by state thing, else you had to pay them like $10 to freeze and unfreeze, unless you had PROOF that your identity was stolen.

Especially considering Equifax had that little “oopsy” (they already leaked all your personal info) 7 years ago, you should absolutely 100% freeze your credit report.

YES you have to unfreeze it when you’re needed to check your credit, but how often does that happen?

Honestly it’s a great excuse to turn down a pushy salesman as well. “Well I really wanna buy this car, but I have to unfreeze my credit report first and my info is at home, so I’ll be back.”

And do you REALLY need that 10th credit card for get that $10 coupon for Khols? Nah.

It’s a bit of work to set up, but once you set it up don’t forget you get a free credit report yearly from each bureau. So space them out every 4 months and then check them yearly.