Owncast
Twitch and YouTube Live, replaced by infrastructure you control: Owncast is a self-hosted live
streaming and chat server. Point OBS, Streamlabs, or any RTMP-capable broadcaster at the
server's ingest port, and Owncast transcodes the feed with FFmpeg into HLS with multiple
quality variants, playing it in a built-in web page with a real-time chat beside it. Chat
supports anonymous participation, custom emotes, and moderation tools - message removal, user
bans and suspensions - with optional authentication via IndieAuth or a Fediverse account.
ActivityPub integration puts the stream on the Fediverse: viewers on Mastodon and compatible
services can follow a channel and get notified the moment it goes live. Video delivery can
come straight off the server or offload HLS segments to S3-compatible object storage so a
modest VPS handles thousands of concurrent viewers while only managing ingest and chat. The
backend is a single Go binary with a React frontend - no accounts platform, no database
server, no dependency stack - and the player embeds in any website. MIT-licensed, with roughly
9k GitHub stars, zero platform fees, and no algorithm or takedown policy between you and your
audience.
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