What do y'all think of the live streaming platform, Owncast?
Owncast
How good of an alternative is it to twitch? I've seen pretty less discussions about it compared to other fediverse platforms
I personally LOVE Owncast. It's how I've met numerous folks and built a community. I use my own for games and tech, https://stream.ozoned.net/ . I've even done some testing to see how much overhead it needs, https://video.firesidefedi.live/w/1itGRqF41XeTfrismnsesL , and how many opens streams you can have.
I also use Owncast to livestream my Fireside Fedi episodes, https://stream.firesidefedi.live/ . I even spoke with Gabe Kangas on the show in the past https://video.firesidefedi.live/w/nyM8V7WzVb1f2GehjAdSTX
I've spoken to numerous folks that flat out tell me it can't work. With THOUSANDS of people you'd probably hit bandwidth limitations, but there's S3 buckets and CDNs. Whether they'll let you push livestreams to those for the long term is yet to be seen.
I'm very biases though as I love Owncast, I love controlling MY platform, and I love Fedi. Also I run the unofficial owncast community.
I like it, I run my own server despite not streaming as much as I used to. Needs more people streaming though.
I've used it a lot, it's great. Discoverability is not, but I'm not streaming for strangers, anyway.
I have a friend that also brought up discoverability as an issue, so she stayed on Twitch. Twitch also has a massive discoverability problem and they have numerous tools, but there's so much noise it's impossible to rise above it.
With Owncast discoverability is organic atm. It's a tiny, but growing pond. Like anything else anymore, if you want to be discovered you have to do the leg work.
But it's definitely NOT Twitch and you won't get famous or make tons of money.
What you can do though is control your platform, stream what you want, etc.
OwnCast is wonderful. It's dead simple to set up and use, and works great with OBS.
I tend to prefer streaming through PeerTube, simply because the platform has more features. But for simplicity, OwnCast can't be beat!
The Fediverse integration of the chat is definitely better in Owncast as well, but in Peertube you can make it federate via XMPP with a little bit of extra effort, which is also nice.
I'm just learning about owncast, is there any way to login or subscribe to people so I can come back to their streams at a later time?
The set name dialog says I can authenticate with a fediverse account via the authenticate dialog, but that doesn't seem to work, at least not with my lemmy account...
But if I succesfully authenticated there's no indication that would let me "subscribe" to a given channel or something though, and that's really what I want
Afaik it is only compatible with Mastodon and similar software, not Lemmy.
You should be able to follow a video channel on Owncast from Mastodon etc. and get updates that way.
The login with Fedi feature is afaik only to join the chat that is displayed next to the video stream.
Haven't heard of this before. Are there any public websites to discover streams? I can't easily find any public websites on mobile that can be used without their app.
Worked great the one time I used it to watch someone
I think the main issue with Owncast is that it is AFAIK single user, otherwise it works very nicely.
Why oh why are streaming platforms still using rtmp in 2025 when it was stopped being developed pretty much in 2009? Why oh why don't they use something like SRT that has packet resending, can negotiate bit rates and adjust and use better codecs than x264 which is awful...