About the Owncast Project

In 2020 the world changed when everyone become stuck in their homes, looking for creative outlets to share their art, skills and themselves from inside their bedroom.

This created an explosion of live streaming on Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Instagram, and Twitch. These services provided everything they needed, an easy way to live stream to the world, and a chat for users to be a part of their community.

There deserves to be a better option for people. Something you could run yourself and get all the functionality of these services, where you could live stream to an audience and and allow them to take part in the chat, just like they’ve been used to on all the other services. But instead of handing control over to somebody else, you run it. You own it all, just like it should be.

You can install Wordpress and self-host your blog, or install Megento and self-host your e-commerce site. You can install Icecast and have your own internet radio station. Spin up an instance of Mastodon and you have your own social media site that you control. You can even install Nextcloud and have your own personal productivity service replacing Dropbox and Google Docs. There’s an open-source alternative to all the big services that you can run for almost everything. There should be a independent, standalone Twitch in a Box.

Keep in mind that while streaming to the big social companies is always free, you pay for it with your identity and your data, as well as the identity and data of every person that tunes in. When you self-host anything you’ll have to pay with your money instead. But running a self-hosted live stream server can be done for as cheap as $5/mo, and that’s a much better deal than selling your soul to Facebook, Google or Amazon.