I noticed that a new community - [email protected] by @[email protected] - has been launched, so maybe there’s been an increase that at least one other person has noticed.

I think there’s also a big shift in people (in this case the viewers) being more willing to consume content from someone on a different platform they’re used to.

For a long time, YouTube, Twitch and TikTok were mostly good to their users. If you weren’t on one of those platforms they weren’t even willing to watch you, because they couldn’t use their Twitch emotes and shit, you’re the “weird guy that just have to use the shitty platform”.

And then they all enshittified, causing people to be increasingly more aware of the existance of the alternatives, but most importantly willing to use them when they encounter them. Now when you see a PeerTube link, you don’t think “slow and always buffering”, you think “oh finally something not on YouTube with ads on top of the creator’s Brilliant/Manscaped/$foodDelivery/$sketchyEnergyDrink. Now you see a PeerTube link and it’s like " yay it’ll just work even with my VPN on and ad blocker”.

That makes it viable for creators to even try to use those services. The enshittification is so bad, it’s worth paying for the platform you broadcast on, manage your own sponsors and ads. Manage it like a real business, be independent.

People are mass switching to Bluesky and Mastodon, people are willing to try and accept alternatives, and aware of the importance of competition and independence.

Lots of people leaving American based social media here in Canada. That has boosted Lemmy. Likely boosted other socials as well. I imagine that’s happening other places than just here.

As for bandwidth and server costs, with gigabit fiber and faster getting more and more common, a lot of “just starting” streamers could comfortably support 100 viewers at 10 Mbps quality straight off their home Internet. Fewer viewers? Stream in full 4K 120Hz at 50 Mbps do your friends if you want.

PeerTube has the advantage of WebTorrent, so an average channel doesn’t have to cost too much in hosting fees. Plus it’s all legal content you own so those are fully legal torrents. It’s also good for ISPs because they might have to transport that video just a few blocks across instead of all the way to the closest Google/AWS/Cloudflare datacenter and back.

I get 500 Mbps unmetered on this $40/mo server, I think it could comfortably handle a couple thousand subscribers before I’d have to scale up, possibly a lot more with a healthy pool of WebTorrent viewers.

I have to agree in that there is a rise in creators are actively looking for alternatives to where they are currently streaming too. YouTube hasn’t been looking to improve their live-streaming section much as they focus more on the Shorts community more, since that’s where they can make more money with. Twitch is floundering in trying to figure out what they want to do with ads or other ways to make money. At least there’s Stream Together which Twitch has been spending so many resources on that pet project for the past 2 years.

Places like Owncast and Peertube offer a better option for those interested in the Fediverse.

This is neet if this is happenning, I’m looking to do some streaming of VR games some time in the future and I think I’ll do them on PeerTube. If more people streams there and use those platform, the better it will be!

There’s at least 3-4 streamers I know about, that stream video gaming on PeerTube. They usually do multiple streams. Owncast, PeerTube and Twitch fx.