Five Years of Owncast

It’s been a year since I’ve written a blog post. So that must mean it’s an Owncast anniversary! But this time, it’s a bigger one. Five years!

The Obligatory “Past 5 Years” Section

Five years is a long time, but it went by really fast. I’ve had a chance to work on a lot of cool things, travel to cool places, and meet a lot of cool people.

I could write a bunch here about five years of building Owncast, but I wrote a lot last year. And that all holds true, so I won’t repeat myself here. Instead I’m going to point you at the most recent edition of the Owncast newsletter where I shared a bunch of thoughts with Kit, the editor. Now is a great time for you to sign up for it if you haven’t. Kit does a great job with it, and it only comes out once a month, or every other month. So it’s low traffic, and it’s a great way to keep up with the project. And as a bonus, I don’t write it, so it’s a chance to not have to listen to me blab about Owncast for a change.

Owncast Merch Store

As long as Owncast has been a project people have asked for a way to get stickers or a t-shirt for themselves. And I never had a good answer for them. At conferences and events I would bring things to pass out, and contributors and supporters could get a t-shirt. But that was always easy because it didn’t require charging people, having a way to manage that money, shipping hassles, and there were no variety of products. Having an actual store would be a big change that I was never ready for.

So I figured for our 5th anniversary, it was time to finally do it. Work for it began many months ago, and it required the work of multiple people to make happen. A special huge thank you to Mitch and Ginger on the design side and Grace from Open Source Collective on the finances side.

But we did it, the Owncast Merch Store is live! You can get an assortment of Owncast branded items. Some of which I had to learn how to ship from my apartment. So now I have a shipping label printer and a stack of shipping materials.

One of the t-shirts is a limited time, 5-year anniversary shirt, designed by Mitch. I wanted something to commemorate the occasion, and it’s super fun. So that will be available as long as it’s available.

I’ve been wearing the embroidered Owncast hoodie pretty much every day now for a while. It’s super comfortable. And when I was in Nashville in February I wore the beanie the entire time because it was freezing out.

With each purchase a small portion of the price will be a donation to the Owncast project itself. Most of the price is to pay for the actual physical item, however. Previously there was no good way to manage that money, it would have had to go to me directly, and I would have had to then donate each purchase back to Owncast. But something came up that allowed us to do this. We are an early adopter of a new feature with Open Source Collective where we have a virtual bank account. So when a purchase is made, that money goes into the account, and that gets deposited directly into our Open Source Collective balance without being funneled through me first. The only downside of the process is the other direction. I have to personally expense the cost of every item as its purchased, otherwise I’m paying for the manufacturing of every item. That will get tedious, but quite expensive if I don’t do it. Even just buying all the different versions of the test items the past few months got expensive.

I encourage you to check it out. I hope you find something you like. And if you do, share a picture on the Fediverse, or wherever. I’d love to see it.

Owncat

Did you see Owncat? He’s super chill. Owncat rules.

New Owncast Fediverse account

When Fosstodon was having it’s little piece of drama I toyed with the idea of just pulling the Owncast Fediverse account completely. We don’t really post much. But people were vocal that they really didn’t want that to happen. And with the 5 year anniversary on the horizon, I figured it was good to be able to reach out. So instead, I thought I’d double down.

I moved Owncast off of Fosstodon to a new private server, just like I had done with my personal account. Fosstodon hasn’t been great to me personally in the past and this was a good excuse to get off of it. Unfortunately, due to some issue with Mastodon, we lost our followers. So we went from over 5,000 to 800. So if you were following us before, you’ll need to re-follow it again now on the new account. Funny how it went from “should we shut down the account?” to “Please follow us again” in a matter of days.

Onward and Upward

I look forward to the next year, and the next five years. I want to thank everyone who’ve allowed me a chance to work on Owncast. It only exists because people have uses for it, and and they want it to exist. So thank you to everyone who has used Owncast, and especially those who’ve contributed in some way. Whether that be code, documentation, support, translations, or just sharing it with a friend. It all matters.

I haven’t been perfect, but I appreciate all of the patience and grace I’ve been given in doing my best with Owncast. I hope you can all tell how much it matters to me, and the place that all of the support plays. I don’t take any of it for granted. I absolutely know that kind of thing can change in a second any given day. But as long as that doesn’t happen, I hope to continue to improve and grow the project, and I hope you’ll keep joining me for the ride.