Looking Back at 2023: A Year of Growth for Alternative Platforms

Hello, how's it going everybody? Welcome to what's really the last episode of the year. It's kind of weird that we actually are at the end of the year. 2023 went by pretty quick.

If you don't know, this is an independent creator podcast where we talk about the alternative platforms of PeerTube, OwnCast, and all the different stuff that are completely different from the mainstream platforms like Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, Discord, and the like. We usually go in the weeds in different directions sometimes, but tonight we're actually gonna take a different approach.

We'll look back at what happened in the past 360-something days. Whatever. How many days are usually in the year? 365? This is what, 340 something. I don't know, math is hard and I'm not gonna hurt my brain this late.

So yeah, we're gonna take a look back at what's actually been happening. There's actually been a lot of stuff that's happened within the alternative platform universe, really the Fediverse, if you wanna go into that route as well. A lot of interesting things have gone on really. We've seen the continuing migration of users from X/Twitter to Mastodon, the opening of BlueSky, and there's been Threads. So much has been going on really in the past year that if you look at it, it's kind of weird that we've gone so much in such a short time within about a year.

And there's so much movement on updates for OwnCast, updates for PeerTube and all sorts of stuff like Matrix and different things like that. So we're gonna take a look at a couple of different things in tonight's episode, kind of close out the year 2023 and look at exactly what has gone on this past year. And then look at some things that might be happening in the future for 2024 and on.

OwnCast: The Game Changer Updates

Let's actually take a look at the first thing which is gonna be OwnCast. Now OwnCast is, if you're watching this on our OwnCast channel, inthebasement.live, it's an open source, self-hosting or do-it-yourself live streaming platform really.

One of the things that happened is that we got our first update to version 0.1.0. And that was actually a big thing because when it released, it was kind of like, holy crap, this is a game changer really. And of course, I did a video on that where it was kind of like, this is the big stuff that you need to look into and a lot of stuff that's been changed.

This one was like the major push to do a lot of improvements that Gabe and everyone else had been working on for quite some time. This one gave us appearance customization. This opened up a lot of different things for people like myself who aren't really schooled into the actual coding of a lot of stuff that goes on behind the scenes, but this one gave you the ability to actually write your own CSS to make your own OwnCast server instance your own thing. You can change the colors and all sorts of stuff.

You could have done that before, but it required you to know HTML and CSS. But you can do this without that knowledge because it gave you those handy dandy color blocks that you can change the different things on. So that was another big thing.

Custom emoji, chat colors. This is another thing where they added in different chat message colors that you can change. As a viewer, you can change your color of your name. The selection of colors can be customized via the appearance customization page. Additionally, as an admin, you can change the set of colors available to your users to match your preferences. So if you want the people coming in, watching your stream, to only have access to say three to four colors, you can change it as an admin, or you can have them all, whatever color you want.

You can also write HTML for external action buttons. I have a button in there right now to a Steam link where you can add a button that you can set for either to a website, or you can put in custom HTML. It's either or. And you can add multiple buttons as well. So you can have, like I have this week's game when I was doing first two hours, you can put that in there. It has a direct link into the Steam page for that game that I was talking about in that one week. And you can set up another button to do something completely different, like an HTML signup form or whatever that you can think of.

Built-in Twitter notifications have been removed because at the time, X/Twitter was continuing. We were seeing the writing on the wall because that's when Elon Musk had bought it back in November of 2022, and then the wave of everybody going away from X/Twitter to Mastodon and other points north. So Gabe and everybody working on OwnCast decided, you know what, let's take out Twitter because they had killed their API. So it was kind of a useless feature. It was like, why do you have this code in here? It was just taking up space. Let's get rid of it.

You can also allow hiding viewer count. So if you don't want people knowing how many people are watching, you can turn that off. There was an admin page for customization, mute embeds, provide HTML instead of a link for external actions, webhooks for stream title change, and so much more.

Over the past couple of months, they had some more changes, some more updates. We had an option to prevent search engine indexing of OwnCast pages, clean up old stream segments in the S3 buckets, preload custom emoji images, use VA API hardware decoding and scaling, and a pop out chat button, which was a great thing.

Now we're on version 0.1.2, where you can stop service from running if you're using pre-installed image, change the directory where OwnCast is installed on your server, which is pretty cool. There was also the ability to log IP addresses, chat display name, and chat user leave events. Some people would love to have that capability to see if someone has come into chat and also if they leave the chat. You can have this on or off simply by going to your admin webpage in your OwnCast instance and changing those settings.

The Search for Alternatives

There was one other thing that a lot of people were actually seeing: a higher increase in people looking or actively seeking out OwnCast and what it's actually capable of doing for live streamers and other content creators. Throughout the whole year, there were a lot of controversies coming around, especially with Twitch and just recently with Twitch's artistic nudity implementation that got rolled back like a day or two later, because it's like, oh yeah, we didn't expect this to happen, even though everyone was telling you that would happen.

So a lot of people are actively seeking out a means of controlling or taking back control of their own content, not only by creating their own websites to put their actual content on and their actual work and then sharing it from there. I've talked about that in the past of starting up your own website, posting up your blog on there or your video files or your audio or your images or whatnot and sharing out from your site to other social networks.

So it's a good thing to see that there are more and more people becoming more aware of alternative platforms like OwnCast and PeerTube as well.

PeerTube's Major 6.0 Update

PeerTube actually released their version 6.0. It's not as easy to get started as OwnCast, but it does provide a way that you can take back control by setting up your own YouTube-like website, your own YouTube server, where you can post up your videos instead of posting up on YouTube. You can post up on your own PeerTube.

This was a big update, just like how OwnCast had their big 0.1 update. PeerTube had their 6.0, where they included password protected videos. So if you want to have a video that is password protected, you have that capability now within PeerTube.

You can do video storyboard support. It automatically generates a storyboard on video upload or imports. Viewers can see the image around the targeted timecode when hovering the progress bar.

They added the ability for users to replace their video file. Now, this is a big thing. You can find my videos and a lot of other stuff that I do within the Indie Creator Hub space on TILVids, which is a PeerTube instance. And this ability to replace your video file when something's already been uploaded is a capability that you can find on YouTube, but the only problem is you won't have that ability unless you're part of the YouTube Partner Program.

You can't just be a new channel and say, "Oh crap, I put up the wrong video." People like myself and many others that are not part of the Partner Program, we would have to delete and re-upload a video. Here, you can replace a video file with an updated page. So you take the entry of your video and you just update it with the newer updated version. You don't have to do any of the stupid delete, re-upload, copy and paste the description, keywords, title, thumbnails, and stuff like that. It's all behind the scenes and its capability is part of the PeerTube instance from the get-go.

You can also do video chapters. Video chapters is a great thing for anyone who's watching a video to easily get to the particular part of the video that they're more interested in. That's if you have set up the chapters. That's on you as a creator uploading your videos.

They also have a better video player. It's more efficient so you don't need to rebuild the player every time the played video changes. Improved SEO and video link sharing. They also fixed client accessibility and keyboard navigation. Improved remote runner management. Added the ability for admins to force transcoding on a specific video, even if it's in a broken state.

So that's a lot of great features that they've added. Lazy download remote video thumbnails, reduce storage, download video file directly from S3 using pre-signed URLs. And it just gets better and better for the PeerTube community.

I did a live stream where I installed a PeerTube instance or server. It took about two hours. Again, I'm not the most up-to-date and knowledgeable at running these types of services. So I believe there is a group that's out there. I saw on Mastodon that had made an easier way to install. It's like a package to install PeerTube on your own server. I have not worked on that yet. I think in 2024, I'm going to at least attempt to try out their implementation of an install package and see how it goes.

The Fediverse Migration

PeerTube has been, again, just like OwnCast has been getting heightened awareness of people coming into the Fediverse to figure out what can I do to get my stuff away from YouTube? Because YouTube has been implementing or is starting to implement some rules and regulations on their platform against ad blockers.

And it's something that we kind of saw the writing on the wall that they're going to be doing this. And it's getting to a point where it's not socially feasible as an independent creator to post our content on YouTube when you're being served up so many ads constantly on the service.

And it's kind of detrimental to think about it that as a YouTube content creator posting my videos to the service, I don't have access to the ad revenue. Even though YouTube is pushing ads into my content, I don't see any kind of a kickback saying, hey, I created this content that you're watching on YouTube.

Now I could say, hey, yeah, that's the thing with a free service. It's part and parcel of the agreement, right? But the bad thing is that they're putting ads on my content and I'm not seeing any kind of money, monetary value coming back to me, even if it was like pennies on a dollar. Still a little bit of something would help out, but I don't see that.

That's why going to TILVids or PeerTube or OwnCast, it's taking back your control of the content you're posting out there. And you can monetize it, no problem. You can have a link in the descriptions of your PeerTube videos that you put out there. And also there is monetization available that you can have a button on your video player or your channel page that leads to your Patreon or to your Ko-fi or wherever that you have a donation page or a tipping page, any kind of monetization page set up.

Same thing for OwnCast, you can set that up as a link to Patreon, Ko-fi, wherever. And there is LibrePay. It's where you can set it up. It's an open way to set up donations and you can have people give you monetary value for your content. You can also set up your payment processing. They support processing payments through Stripe and PayPal. It's run transparently by a nonprofit organization. Source code is public and relies on your support to keep LibrePay running and improving.

The Social Media Shake-Up

On the Fediverse side of things, alternatives to X/Twitter. We saw the rise and fall of T2 when they renamed themselves to Pebble. I believe within two months, it was very short after their renaming to Pebble that they posted out there that they are shutting down. And it was another alternative to X/Twitter.

Same thing with BlueSky. Mastodon is still continuing to lead the charge of the actual open source, open platform, federated network for social media, social networking to get together with other like-minded people that you don't have to worry about a large corporation dictating what exactly you are supposed to be putting out there. And if you put something out there that is deemed, oh, not to their liking, at least you have the capability to move your account to another server if the admin decided they're not gonna have this running anymore.

Just recently, I've been on all of the alternative platforms lately, like on BlueSky, I'm on there. I've been on Threads, but just recently on Threads I decided to open it up one morning and it said, oh, enter your phone number to log back in. I'm like, what? I've been on Threads since they started publicly a couple of months ago. And now you want my phone number? No, I'm sorry. I like to minimize the amount of times I'm putting my phone number out there.

So it's like, okay, I'm no longer on Threads. If you don't want it, fine, screw you. And I'm perfectly fine on just Mastodon and BlueSky. I don't need Threads. I liked Threads because it gave you how Twitter was back in the day. It's the early starts. It was kind of like the midway point of Twitter where you had all the brands and had a lot of people that are there.

But it's just rubbing me the wrong way when it says, oh, we need your phone number to log in. No, you had my information from Instagram. Oh, Instagram now requires, well, I guess my account is held hostage until the end of time because I can't, I'm not gonna give you my phone number in order for me to delete my account. No, sorry, that's not gonna happen.

So I'm very comfortably, perfectly fine on Mastodon. I love Mastodon. Mastodon has continued to have more and more people come over. Same thing with BlueSky. BlueSky is still on the invite system, but it's growing. It's very Twitter-esque how it feels, how you're immersed into the world.

Looking back at it, I'd say that its growth has been hammered down a little bit because of the invite-only system. Again, I keep mentioning Mastodon because since November of last year, it's been continuing. It's been going on for years and years prior to everything that's been going on with X/Twitter. But only from last November, it's just exploded onto the scene where pretty much almost everybody was talking about Mastodon.

And of course, you know, I have some people saying, "Oh, it's too difficult. I can't deal with this. I have to actually work. I can't have my hand held to figure out what I need to look at."

Well, unfortunately, that's not the case. Yes, there is some difficulty for some people who are not comfortable with that, but you know what? It's getting better. I think more people are starting to come across that line that, "Oh, I actually do have to actually do some work."

We've been for a decade and a half, almost 20 years of this stuff, people growing up only knowing how to do Twitter or Facebook or anything like that, and to all of a sudden to have them within the ecosystem of Mastodon and OwnCast and PeerTube, and it's just kind of like they're kind of lost in the wind, really, which is a shame because they kind of lost those skills of how to deal with it.

And it's pretty much on us as a community to not make fun and not to belittle them, but actually say, "Hey, if you want to actually try this out, give it a shot, we can help you." More than happy to help.

Looking Forward to 2024

I can see going into next year, 2024, we're gonna see more and more people that are completely new, have no idea, and more and more of them are coming into Mastodon, and we'll see some more posts like that. But again, like I said, it's on us as a community that are already here, we know what to do, or have a higher understanding of what to do, and show these people coming in.

It's not as scary as it might seem. Those postings on Twitter or Facebook saying, "Mastodon is the devil's work. If you go in there, you're a sinner," or whatever. I don't know, I'm just pulling out some kind of over-exaggeration.

But I see more and more people going to Mastodon, and even more people are probably going into Threads or BlueSky. Because those are more of how Twitter is for them, with somewhat of an algorithm, but it's just the user experience for people who don't want to do much. They don't want to do too much thinking. They just want to be shown a product and say, "Oh, that's great, yes, no, like," and go from there.

And I can see some more people diversifying more into live streaming and PeerTube, or OwnCast, because I think more people are starting to see that Twitch is kind of, it's not on its last legs, but you have to diversify. You can't just stay on one platform and expect people to show up. It's not gonna happen, hasn't been happening for the past couple years, and more than likely, going forward from now, is even more detrimental if you just stay on one platform.

The Decline of Traditional Platforms

I think live streaming on these platforms, like Twitch, is gonna be detrimental, as long as you don't have a presence on any other platforms, like LiveSpace, or your own OwnCast. If you don't want to go through and don't want to deal with having to run your own server and stuff like that, that's fine, because there's services out there called LiveSpace. There's another one that is just getting started, it's actually opened up in beta, it's called SharePlay. These are options that are available to you. You're not just stuck to Twitch and YouTube as your live streaming platforms.

If you really think about it, in the past year, we've seen the overall decline of Twitch year over year. Yeah, they had a great spike in 2020, in March 2020, when COVID lockdowns all happened. Of course, that's kind of like a non-starter, but ever since then, it has been a steady decline of viewership and people who are live streaming to that service.

And even now, with the amount of ads that Twitch wants you to run, I looked at the last time I looked at my Twitch creator dashboard, they want you to run at least seven minutes of ads per hour. And that's kind of ridiculous for a live stream. For the past couple of months, I had an ad scheduler because I had to set it up for three minutes of ads per hour, just to get rid of pre-rolls.

And I was thinking to myself, if people are coming into my stream on Twitch in the middle of an ad break, they'll get, even after I've already set it up to run three minutes of ads, if they come in halfway through or three quarters through, they will still get three minutes of ads. It's very confusing, but they get a full three minute block of ads every hour. And I'm like, was that really necessary? I was only getting maybe 15 cents each month. It's not really worth it.

I was actually providing an option. It's like, hey, if you don't want to watch this ad-filled stream, come watch it over on my OwnCast server or on LiveSpace. I can see that ads are gonna be pushed a lot more going forward, because this has been like a slow ramp up in the past year of, you need to run more ads.

Taking Back Control

For almost six months now, I've been solely focusing on my OwnCast server at Indie Basement and other places like YouTube and also now with LiveSpace and now adding in SharePlay. I'm pretty much tearing this out as OwnCast server, LiveSpace, SharePlay, Twitch. Twitch is on the bottom.

For this podcast and anything I do for Indie Creator Hub, I have a Twitch account, but I don't use it. I'm not streaming on Twitch right now. I'm streaming on just the three platforms: YouTube, LiveSpace, and my OwnCast. And that's perfectly fine. I'd rather have a little bit more control and have a less ad or have an ad-free experience for potential viewers.

I see the growing trend over the past year of more people looking into controlling their own content, whether by websites or live streaming platforms like PeerTube, which also has video hosting capability, but it also does live streaming. Or if you want to just do OwnCast, where it's a little bit more, let me put it this way. I put OwnCast over PeerTube. That's just because it's a more simpler and more streamlined, but it also does exactly what it's built to do. It's a focused product to do live streaming. And that's perfectly fine.

If I want to do video hosting, I'll go with PeerTube because you can't do that with OwnCast. OwnCast is a live streaming service piece of kit. That's all it does. And it does it quite well. It's not a jack of all trades, master of none type of situation.

So it's kind of great to see these focused built services that you can utilize for free. All you gotta do is just take care of, if you have the hardware, host it on your own hardware, or you pay a web hosting or server hosting like Hetzner, DigitalOcean or Linode and go take it from there. But the software is free, it's open source.

I like to see this happen more and more coming into 2024, to see more wider adoption. It's great to see.

Building Community

There's a growing OwnCast community that we're just getting started. We'd love if you're very interested in learning more about OwnCast, check out the owncast.rocket.chat server and join it. It's not just for support. It's actually anything to do with OwnCast. And we'd definitely love to see some more people come in there and give their two bits and to sign up for the newsletter too. The first newsletter was awesome. A lot of great information. And it's every month, so definitely sign up.

There is on New Year's Day or New Year's Eve, Federated Radio is conducting a multi-host of multiple OwnCast servers, kind of like a New Year's Eve party throughout the whole day and throughout the evening as well throughout time zones for New Year. So definitely check it out.

If you also wanna join a great community, join up at thisindiecreator.com. It's our forums. We do have a newsletter that I send out monthly as well. That also came out this past week. Talking about all the latest stories that in the past month, anything to do with alternative platforms, like I said, OwnCast, PeerTube, Guilded, Matrix, forums software, because we use Invision Community, anything to deal with independent creation, as well as indie game development as well. We have a section there for the indie game developers. We'd love to see more of them come in as well.

Wrapping Up 2023

That's gonna be it for this episode. Remember that if you're not here during the live, the live taping or the live studio audience, every other Tuesday at 9:30. This is probably gonna be the last episode of 2023. Next episode is gonna be next year because next week is Christmas holiday week.

So if you are practicing, or you observe Christmas or anything else, Hanukkah, whatever, happy holidays, Merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, and all sorts of other stuff for you. Enjoy next week, the holiday season, and I'll see you into the next year. I'll see you next year. I know that's a really bad dad joke, but yeah. You'll get used to it. I have a lot of bad dad jokes anyways.

But until next time, I'll catch you next year, and we'll be doing more alternative platform looks and talking more about independent creators here on the Independent Creator Podcast. Been your host, Josh, and I'll see you next time. Have a good night.

The Independent Creator