Federated conference videos

So, foss-north 2019 happened. 260 visitors. 33 speakers. Four days of madness.

During my opening of the second day I mentioned some social media statistics. Only 7 of our speakers had mastodon accounts, but 30 had twitter accounts.

Day two of #fossnorth2019 is starting! @e8johan is giving a quick opening before the key notes. pic.twitter.com/4fScLfY9Y6

— (((Niclas Zeising))) (@niclaszeising) April 9, 2019

Given the current situation with an ongoing centralization of services to a few large provides, I feel that the Internet is moving in the wrong direction. The issue is that without these central repository-like services, it is hard to find contents. For instance, twitter would be boring if you had noone one to tweet to.

That is where federated services enter the picture. Here you get the best of two worlds. For instance mastodon. This is a federated micro blogging network. This means that everyone can host their own instance (or simply join one), and all instances together create the larger mastodon society. It even has the benefit of creating something of a micro-community at each server instance – so you can interact with the larger world (all federated mastodon servers), and your local community (the users of your instance).

There are multiple federated solutions out there. Everything from nextcloud, WordPress, pixelfed, matrix, to peertube. The last one, peertube, is a federated alternative to YouTube. It has similar benefits to mastodon, so you have the larger federated space, but also your local community. Discussing the foss-north videos with Reg over Mastodon, we realized that there is a gap for a peertube instance for conference videos.

Sorry for the Swedish. We basically agree that a peertube instance for conference videos is a great idea.

I really hate to say that something should happen, and not having the time to do something about it. There are so many things that really should happen. Luckily, Reg reached out to me and said – what about me setting it up.

Said and done, he went to spacebear and created an instance of peertube. Got the domain conf.tube. I started migrating videos and tested it out. You can try it yourself. For instance, here is an embedded video from the lightning talks:

If you help organizing a conference and want to use federated video hosting, contact Reg to get an account at conf.tube. If you’re interested in free and open source, drop in at conf.tube and check out the videos.