Blog posts from Gabe
In 2024 "Owncasts" for iOS was released as a side project to give a native interface on the iPhone and AppleTV. I highly recommend you read the first post in this series: Owncasts for iOS and tvOS . It will detail what the goal with the application were, and how it came to life. It was something that wasn't directly connected to or maintained by the Owncast project. And it hadn't been touched much…
It’s been a year since I’ve written a blog post. So that must mean it’s an Owncast anniversary! But this time, it’s a bigger one. Five years! The Obligatory “Past 5 Years” Section Link to heading Five years is a long time, but it went by really fast. I’ve had a chance to work on a lot of cool things, travel to cool places, and meet a lot of cool people. I…
May 23rd, 2024 marks the 4th anniversary of the first commit of Owncast, aptly titled: “WIP”. WIP Link to heading It was a bit before exactly four years ago when I actually started working on it in earnest, but not that far before. I remember duct taping a proof of concept together, opening my laptop’s web port to the public internet, messaging somebody and asking “Could you open this URL in…
Owncast is server software. That’s it Link to heading First off, I want to clarify: Owncast is server software for anybody to run their own, independent, decentralized, completely standalone video streams. It provides some additional features that streamers and their viewers can use, but at its core it’s a piece of video server software. That’s what I, personally, care about, and…
I missed the first week of the year, but I still wanted to write a bit about Owncast and share my appreciation what this past year has brought for Owncast. As every year before it, Owncast has had the opportunity to be used to solve more people’s live streaming needs, be viewed by more people, and have more conversations around decentralization, Big Tech alternatives, The Fediverse, and all…
While I try to keep a public roadmap , and keep a reasonable plan for Owncast, I rarely have an opportunity to gush to anybody (other than my therapist, and he doesn’t get it) about features I’m looking forward to building. So I thought I’d write a quick blog post to share some of my personal thoughts on my vision of future Owncast features from a high level. The frontend rewrite Link to…
This post is a continuation of posts leading up to Owncast v0.1.0 that discusses some of the high level goals for the release. Read the first post about a Owncast redesign for part 1. Hack the planet! Link to heading One of the high level goals for Owncast since day one was hackibility. I wanted what was shipped to be a starting point for people looking to run their own custom live streams, not a…
With Owncast v0.1.0 starting a bug fixing and a super early testing phase now, I thought I’d write some blog posts about what it’s been like to get this far in this rather large release. A lot of projects don’t go into depth about how the sausage is made, and Owncast is no exception. I’m generally an open book if you ask or are involved with contributing to the project, but I usually don’t go out…
Imagine you were hired as a babysitter by some parents for their child. They are usually pretty casual about things, but they mentioned the kid has to go to bed at 8pm. 8pm comes around and the movie the kid is watching has 5 minutes left. And while I’ve never been a babysitter, and I know nothing about children, I would like to think that I, and probably most people, would let the kid watch…
Often the first thing brought up when discussing decentralized content is the difficulty of discovery. Big Tech has all these data points combining the content on their platform with all the consumers so they can make educated guesses to route people to content that benefit the platform, data brokers, advertisers, governments, and lastly somewhere down the line the consumers. How can those who…