Owncast Newsletter January 2025
In This Issue
- A Longer Note From The Editor
- Technical Updates
- Features
- Closing Remarks
A Longer Note From The Editor
A gracious hello from my daybed, which is indeed where I tend to write these. It's hilarious to look back at the last newletter's prediction of "we'll be back in December", clearly based on the notion that this would publish while I was on my company's holiday shutdown. Trying to round up sources and...well, news...while navigating the holiday season was a fool's errand, and so what was a end-of-year 2024 retrospective next became a "2024-to-2025" theme, and then just "let's do one in January". But still, a moment for reflection seems in order.
2024 was a different year for me in the Owncast ecosystem. Owncast was a way for me to get in my reps as a DJ and to help be part of a streaming ecosystem outside of big business and enshittification. My logic was simple...if I was going to be little more than background noise on Twitch, then why not attract the same tiny audience using Owncast? This pushed me to play more and develop. This also has grown as the reason I'm streaming less these days– I'm playing the same number of times a month; they're just in person. I'm getting gigs and offering music to local events and organizations I believe in, and that's meant less time for shows at home.
2024 has also been the year of the newsletter and the Roku app. I've found all too often that discoverability is the biggest challenge for independent creators, and that the critical pieces are: being easily found and letting your audience know when you're on. The Roku app was an attempt to help with the former, and the newsletter with the latter. Still these have also eaten into the time I might otherwise give to shows, and so the stream's been quiet most of the year.
2025 stands a good chance of being just as "IRL busy" again; the year's barely started and I'm already watching my travel schedule fill to the brim. It just means I need to get more creative; more of my rehearsals need to be streamed! One thing I do know for sure, though, is that I'll also be out here trying to hold up a mirror to the community, to help improve the visibility of our creators, and to hopefully do some small part to keep the lights on.
Now for the part where I do the Saturday Night Live host bit. We've got a great newsletter for you. There's a new Owncast release, an upcoming Roku app release, a nod over to the fine people at JNKTN, and in lieu of a featured streamer this edition, we're spending some time saying thank you and goodbye to Radio Free Fedi.
As always, please circulate the newsletter widely, and remember that there's nothing to report if you don't share what's going on in your own projects. There's no community without you!
Technical Updates
Owncast 0.2.x Series Released
Owncast project maintainer Gabe Kangas announced the release of Owncast 0.2.0 on January 11, followed shortly after by bugfix release of Owncast 0.2.1. The list of updates and changes is extensive, but if the new Owncast server doesn't feel like it's changed a whole bunch, that's intentional!
"The big theme is a backend architecture refactor that allows us to build the fun stuff we want to build," Gabe has informed the newsletter, adding that the Owncast backend had become "Just stuff piled on top of stuff, and future features require access to different components, so the old way just won't suffice. Time to take a step back and prepare for the next set of features."
Stopping for a refactor is actually a transition point many open source projects never reach. The many contributors to Owncast 0.2.0 have given an incredible effort to set the project up for future successes, and server maintainers can do their part to celebrate this work by upgrading and filing thoughtful bug reports and feedback.
New Features For Roku Owncasts
On a break from work over the holidays, I, your humble editor, added something to the Owncasts Roku app that I've been missing since...well, since the time I wrote the app a year ago. I wanted all my favorite streams to appear front-and-center in the app, and to easily see which are online. I'm happy to report we've got that soon to publish! In the near future, Roku users will be able to save a stream to their "favorites" row, and all streams carry a small "LIVE" badge when they're online. It'll auto-update after publishing, and likely to go out shortly after this newsletter releases.
Goings On About Town: JNKTN Holiday Season Stream
Long-time readers of the newsletter will recall that, in our December 2023 edition, we mentioned independent music powerhouse JNKTN was going through a change of leadership as founder JumboShrimp was stepping back to focus on family life. Since then, there's been a fair amount of quiet from JNKTN, but they were spotted earlier this year having a summertime streaming event...and on December 14, 2024, they hosted a holiday season streaming event as well!
The stream carried JNKTN perennials Unpopular Stream and 404 Not Found, Fygma's Spicy Synths, and capped off with a holiday set from Jumboshrimp himself. It's really exciting to see JNKTN come back to stream again. Will this portend of more JNKTN in 2025? One can only hope so!
A Heartfelt Farewell To Radio Free Fedi
This month, Radio Free Fedi (RFF), a juggernaut of community-driven media, Owncast, and the Fediverse, chose to end its broadcast day. The streams are down, the website is now a simple farewell message, and the music, for now, is silent. It's clear from their messages, both on the website and through the Fediverse, that the burdens of community management, media management, organization, running the site and the streams, etc, etc, overwhelmed its core maintainers, and they made the difficult decision to end the project.
RFF was, of course, a "friend of the newsletter". Over the last year, they appeared here twice as they coordinated both a winter and summer "par-raid", semi-formal arrangements of live performers turned into a fluid event through a shared chat space and RFF providing infrastructure to bring the audiences to the performers. RFF's winter 2024 par-raid even featured MXKS, the musical project of this newsletter's editor. These events were not just delightful celebrations of what a community can do for itself, they were also important promotion and discovery opportunities for their participants.
RFF was a huge source of delight for a community hungry to find and share music and spoken word performance outside of corporate streaming silos. Their impact on the community was immense, and their absence will be felt deeply. This newsletter hopes everyone involved gets time to decompress, and we hope to get the chance to feature them in other projects in the future.
Those who step up to create community infrastructure often do so so they can "be the change they want to see in this world". Someone has a passion for music and see a lack of 24/7 radio stations promoting music they believe in, so they start one. If the project's successful, though, the management effort can quickly eat up all the time and resources that used to go into that original passion. You start a streaming station because you love music, but now you're a community manager, PR contact point, fundraiser, and more. In the end, this is where community support matters the most, but even then, burnout is always looming. Sprinting isn't sustainable; even jogging eventually wears one down.
Thanks, RFF. You gave us a vision to live up to.
Closing Remarks
Please remember this newsletter, as much as it contains use of the "editorial we", is really the work of one person. I don't have help locating events, building a calendar, or even getting quotes for the articles. I'm doing my best to hold up a mirror to the community where I see it. I rely extensively on people in the community sharing their announcements and stories with me. Please, if you want to see something in the newsletter, get in touch with me. I might just decide to release an edition because of what you bring to me.
Additionally, if you'd like to help build the social fabric of the Owncast community, please consider checking out the #owncast-community channel on rocket.chat or the Owncast community on Lemmy.
Until then, be good to each other and keep the streams running!