@gabek @josh As someone who tried to get off Twitch to create my own Owncast server, I can tell you it was problematic… Josh tried to help in the ways he could with videos after the fact, but I stupidly mangled it all and ended up becoming so frustrated I just walked away. My biggest hurdle was the simple act of acquiring and connecting a Hetzner server and it just went down hill from there… I mean, I had problems figuring out the concept of a Droplet… Self-hosting is never going to be in my future. The verbage, the jargon, and the learning curve were too steep and time-consuming. I’ve spent a lifetime learning and doing art and theatre. I couldn’t take this on, too.

I hear setting up PeerTube instance is even more challenging. Most folks won’t have any experience acquiring the equipment or connections or doing the things required to set up a streaming server. That’s far too much to expect for anyone to do who is simply trying to get off the Twitch boat. But the middle-ground (streaming on someone else’s PeerTube server) isn’t nearly fleshed out enough to attract most streamers used to a more robust set of features.

So I agree with you, and I’m sad I wasn’t the target audience because I thought I wanted it. I felt like it was for me. But it was like learning a recipe: I didn’t even know what half the ingredients were let alone how to use them to make a dish.

And I don’t have to know any of that anywhere else—I can focus on my content and what I do best. So I let it go.

@josh

RE #Peertube:

Framasoft needs to want PeerTube to grow, but I don’t think that’s really a priority for them right now. IIRC, they’ve said they want to keep staff small and lean hard into slow, incremental growth. They don’t want large angel donations.

The ramifications of that choice include not having the capacity to upgrade quickly, facilitate new features, or even squash bugs with the expediency some might expect. For example, livestreaming & chat control for non-Admins just isn’t a real priority for them, but a real barrier to new streamer-users.

RE #Owncast:

I can’t afford the investment (machinery-wise, server-wise, nor time-wise) to own and operate my own livestream. I’m dumb. I need a simple RTMP “copy-paste-click-go” user interface with someone behind it all who knows how to address potential problems. I donate for that on MakerTube. Owncast itself seems simple, but getting there doesn’t feel that way. And ultimately, it’s not cheap.

The fact that both of these platforms are Open Source colors everything. It feels like they want to be found by users, not sold to them. Marketing seems antithetical, and barriers to use are a protective feature from the “unwashed” and (consequently) sometimes dangerous.

You have to *want* to use most of the Fediverse despite the hurdles, and that takes more drive than most have. Viewers go where the herd goes, sadly, and the Fediverse vacillates between wanting to entice that herd and protecting themselves from it.