Owncast is a free and open source live video and web chat server for use with existing popular broadcasting software.
Basically it’s Twitch, or any streaming platform such as YouTube Gaming or whatever it’s called now, that you can run on your own hardware. Control your platform and your content where you make the rules as to what you can/can’t do.
There’s a growing community and you can find folks streaming all kinds of things in the directory:
https://directory.owncast.online/
I know some folks think it’s not possible to run something like that as it’d require tons of PC resources, but I’ve run an Owncast Stream with 70+ active open connections to the server on a $8/month VPS.
The install can be as simple as a VPS that will spin up an Owncast instance for you, or as “difficult” as pulling the Owncast script and running it and it just automatically sets everything up. It’s probably the easiest software installation I’ve done in a long time and I’ve been in IT for 15 years.
I also run the [email protected] community so if anyone has any questions please don’t hesitate to poke me there or Matrix or come check out a stream, I’m usually hanging out on someone’s stream somewhere. :-D Or don’t hesitate to ping me on any one of the platforms in my bio.
Why… not just stream on discord? You’re already using it. This honestly seems like a lot of extra work for very little pay off.
Discord’s video quality is pretty mediocre. If you’ve already got a home server somewhere and a decent internet connection, streaming 1080p or higher over this probably works better than streaming over Discord.
You can buy Discord premium or whatever it’s called, but that’s priced high enough that a home server electricity bill or even a VPS with pretty decent specs can be had for the same price.
As for why you’d go through the effort: same reason Linux users don’t run Windows, because they like the philosophy or because they want the control over their stuff.
Edit: also, streaming games from Linux through Discord still doesn’t support sound. I work around this by using Pipewire’s ability to re-route game output into the microphone input stream for voice chat, but that’s just a stupid workaround for Discord’s bad service.
Also, if you want to stream to multiple discord servers there is not an easy way to do that. I have multiple friend groups and they don’t really mix. This is easier and it lets me fully use OBS without weird webcam integration from OBS to Discord.
It’s weird to me that people on Lemmy are asking “why not just use <for-profit platform at some level of enshitification> instead?”