Others already suggested great answers, so I won’t repeat them, but I let my kids play on pbskids.org . tons of fun and educational videos and games for kids if they’re younger.

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.

Amateur!

<gets out his penny-farthing>

Owncast Stream whatever you want on your own platform and announce natively to the Fediverse!

IDK why but tons of folks think it’s not feasible as they need million dollar computers. I’ve streamed to 70+ open streams, albeit as a test, on a like $5/month VPS. The key is that the resources needed are how many qualities you’re transcoding, not how many folks are viewing. Yes bandwidth is needed for each viewer, but that’s significantly less than people imagine.

Full transparency I run the !owncast@lemmy.world community, but I’m in no way affiliated with the project. I just love open platforms and open source.

I’ve been on Proton for years and I’ve had a Visionary account for years. Proton’s price doesn’t really go up, but the quality and features does immensely. They give me extra storage every year. I get more VPNs, more password managers, more and more and more. IMO they have a track that shows they care about privacy and want to make things better.

https://signal.org/blog/keeping-spam-off-signal/

Well aware. And I trust Proton more than my local ISP.

Because the average person doesn’t have a clue and they never think about this kind of thing. I’ve been called a conspiracy theorist by my own father as well as othesr for mentioning Snowden revalatins and using a VPN and all the privacy steps I take on the web.

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.

libreddit is the Reddit front end. Reddit did something, it seems they blocked IP addresses. There are ways around it and folks do have some instances, but there’s sitll a lot out there that don’t work. You can rung your own libreddit and put it through Cloudflare’s bridge thing and then point libredirect to your own libreddit for stability.

Their design was more mobile type wherr you don’t minimize windows, you just switch between them or between spaces. I’ve used Gnome forever, including the rough times on Gnome 3.0, and I’ve always used a system tray as well. Never liked leaving clutter everywhere and imo it goes against the minimal design. But thankfully easily extendible.

It was in the description of the video, but it’s a Hetzner VPS with 3 cores, 4GB of ram, 80GB disk, 20TB bandwidth.

This is literally the self-hosted community. I’m talking about self-hosted livestreaming platform. If you want to call it a blog + video, ok sure. Everything is basically a rehash of everything else. Just trying to share some self-hosted information. And I’m not the dev of Owncast or anything, just someone trying to make others aware of self-hosting software.