this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Owncast, while not federated technically, exists. Bandwidth over the years has gotten a lot cheaper, and even real time video encoding has made significant improvements with av1 reducing bandwidth over all, though I'm not sure owncast supports it yet. A reasonably motivated streamer could absolutely host their own website and livestream to it, at not an outrageous cost.
It would be prohibitive to size though, as you'd have to scale up servers and distribute bandwidth between multiple servers quite quickly. Having server usage be done in a cooperative fashion across multiple datacenters - which is one thing that twitch effectively does - would be preferable. I think that something like Owncast would be ineffective to distribute to more than a few dozen people.
I wonder if we'll come up with a better solution that's accessible and affordable, or if we'll forever be reliant on shitty megacorps for big streamers like we like to see today.
Scaling from a few dozen sure is a big undertaking, but the vast majority of streamers are streaming to only a few dozen at a time. Something a relatively strong VPS can handle. Once your audience is above that, then is it not unreasonable to expect actual broadcasting infrastructure? I think the argument being made is that twitch as it is, with basically infinite free video encoding is massively unsustainable.
Platforms like Floatplane exist, which is sustainable. So its not an unfathomable problem to solve, its just more complicated than text.