 We are live on YouTube. I'm gonna go over to my YouTube tab. I have open and double check, but yes, it looks like we are live. If you are watching us on the watch site or on YouTube, you are seeing a capture of a jitzy call that we are all in. It might be a little bit choppy at times if you are sensitive to that because we're asking a lot of my computer today. But what we're gonna be doing today is using all four of the open media ecosystem tools at once to do a big reclaim ed tech simulcast. And yeah, I'm pretty excited. So the first piece of this is of course jitzy. So we're in, jitzy we covered, was that week two that we covered jitzy? Yes, it was a ZuraCast jitzy on Cast PeerTube. Cool. So jitzy, if you need a refresher, it's the self-hostable video calling tool. We are in it right now. I have it set up on my computer in its own little window and that's just so that I can capture it and bring it into the YouTube stream for us. And also so I can capture the audio from it. So yeah. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna one by one send streams to the other tools, all of the same content. And if you are looking for the links to those, if you're watching live, that's on the reclaim ed.tech website. So if I just share my screen here real quick, we're gonna have some extra windows here. Audio is a little bit hot and okay. So I don't, I might have to just turn down the output volume a little bit. Okay, so, but if you go to reclaim ed.tech, click on session five. The three links down here are our other three places that we're gonna stream other than YouTube. So reclaim TV link, reclaim radio link, own Cast link. I'm gonna start with, we're actually gonna go in this order. So the first, the next thing I'm gonna bring up is reclaim TV. And the cool thing about this one is that I can actually use PeerTube itself to, sorry, I can actually use Jitzi itself to send the stream there. So if you're watching on the YouTube link, you'll see me doing this. So I'm gonna hit start live stream. And then what I have to do is, I already created a live link in PeerTube. And I have to paste in the link, the RTMP link, then a slash. And then my stream. I can't, yeah. But people watching on YouTube will see this. And then, yeah. Yeah, I can say that on YouTube. Cool. This will be extremely meta in very confusing ways. So it'll probably make more sense after the fact, being able to see the recordings of... Live streaming is on. Okay, so live streaming is going. So the way most live streaming stuff works is it usually needs at least 15 to 30 seconds to kind of spool up the stream. So in a few seconds or so, we should be able to go to that PeerTube link and the live will kick in. A few seconds, probably 15 seconds or so. The neat thing is this is all happening between things on Reclaim Cloud, right? So PeerTube is receiving the stream directly from Jits. I'm seeing it live now. Cool, so I'm gonna post that link in Discord. We've got PeerTube up. So then the next one, and now I am gonna share my screen, will be to set up Reclaim Radio. So unfortunately, there isn't a real direct... Let me share my screen here. So I'm sharing my screen in Jitsi. You'll be able to see the Reclaim Radio page. We do. Cool. So there isn't, yeah. I just said I'm good here as well. I can see it. Okay, there isn't a direct way to send a like audio stream from Jitsi to Azurecast. So we have to use a different tool to capture the audio and bring it in. So I'm gonna do that using Audio Hijack. There are a lot of programs that can send audio to Azurecast. There's broadcast using this tool, which is abbreviation of but. So that's one. There is, I can't remember what that, there's a Mac OS only one, but I really like Audio Hijack. It does cost money, but I think it's worth it. Not a subscription tool. You can just pay once and get it. So I have this set up to capture audio from my audio mixing software, which is called Wavelink, and send it out to Reclaim Radio. So I'm gonna hit go on that. And in again, like 30 seconds or so, well, I guess way less time, we should get the audio from Azurecast. I am going to actually listen to that real quick. It's not gonna come through the stream, but just to make sure it's actually working. It's still coming through as music for me. The picture popped up, but the audio may be on a slightly longer delay. I think you're correct. I think the metadata comes through before the actual like. Yeah. It's coming through now. Here it comes. Cool. I hear Pilot talking about what was said 15 seconds ago that it's coming through as music. It's awesome. I love this. So we got Azurecast up. It's receiving stuff from Audio Hijack. If anyone is curious, this little tiny chart in the top of my menu bar is my CPUs on my computer. They're mostly being used. So now we're gonna give it a owncast. So that's the last tool of the trio of broadcasting tools. So owncast, I'm gonna send a stream from OBS. It would be really cool if I could somehow hook up Jitsi to stream to more than one place at a time. Unfortunately, it just, I don't know of a way to do that. So I'm gonna actually do something kind of similar to what I'm doing for Azurecast. I'm gonna use OBS to capture the call and send it in. This is actually very similar to what I'm doing for our YouTube stream too. So I'm gonna put OBS on the screen. It's gonna result in a little infinite Hall of Mirrors effect. But just to kind of show, it's just a simple scene that's simply grabbing our Jitsi call in. So I'm gonna, I've already got our credentials set up in here for owncast. And I'm gonna hit the stream button. And I'm gonna move that off screen. And in a little bit, owncast should come online. There we go. So I'm seeing it now. Yeah. So we are now going to four places. YouTube or the watch site for Reclaim AdTech, owncast, ZuraCast, and PeerTube, all at once. Yeah. You're so happy right now. It's very upset. That is pretty awesome. So like I said, the next step for me and actually you mentioned it in the chat here, Jim, something like restream.io. I want some kind of open source re-stream.io. And to be fair, it exists. It's called FFMpeg. That's right. That you could totally do this with FFMpeg. However, it would require, FFMpeg is a command line only tool. And it would require some kind of FFMpeg wizard to do it and I'm not comfortable with it. But I think it would be possible to have FFMpeg receive a stream and then output it to multiple different destinations. And you could run that in Reclaim Cloud or you could run it on your own computer. I would run it in Reclaim Cloud so that the networking aspect wouldn't be a problem. One of the things that we're, I have pretty good home internet. I have a 500 megabit symmetrical fiber connection. So I'm not really worried about our bandwidth but like last year at this time, I had a 20 megabit DSL connection. And it's very possible that running this in any industry, I don't know if my network would have results in this issue. Honestly, it's possible I still will now just be making the work of that. So that's the thing. I don't think, this is a cool gimmick of us using a mall at once just to kind of showcase like, here are the ways that you can make connections between these tools. But I think realistically, you're using one or two at a time. And to me the real, I think the real winning combination that in terms of simplicity is likely jitsie to peer tube. Once you set those things up, the ability to just drop in a jitsie call and put a URL in to stream to and it will just go is kind of next level easy once you have it set up in a way that I think is really cool. More from an archival perspective, but one of the things that I've been thinking about is that we talked about a little, a little bit in the peer tube session was the fact that you can use peer tube to host audio, not just video. And so the idea of in addition to pushing your live streams from jitsie to peer tube, pushing whatever you do with a ZuraCast, making sure that it gets recorded, and then you can push that recording to peer tube and have that in your archive as well. I don't know if you could, I imagine you probably couldn't push a ZuraCast directly to peer tube, although... You could with some clever scripting. It would require some work, but you could do it. The peer tube has a CLI that you could actually install on the ZuraCast node in Reclaim Cloud and then automate that to like once an hour, once a day, look for recordings and upload them. You could totally do that. I'm going to manually move it over, especially, and I think for most people that would be good enough, right? But... I meant in terms of if you're hosting an event, not in jitsie, but in a ZuraCast the way back during Hacks for Hybrid, the very last event was Jim, you, Lauren and Marin, I believe, talking just over a ZuraCast, not a peer tube stream. Would it be possible to stream, or not a video stream, would it be possible to stream just audio a ZuraCast into peer tube and have it deal? Not in a simple way. Yeah, I figured. Could peer tube will not accept just audio as a live streaming format, and the protocols you use to stream audio to a web radio station are very different to what you use for live video. However, there are two workarounds. You could do something like I'm doing and use OBS and you would just have an OBS stream with like a static image and the audio, right? You could send that to peer tube. The other thing that's kind of cool, and this is again going to Audio Hijack, which is not a free to use tool, but is I think an amazing tool in terms of capability. I'm gonna share my screen again here. Audio Hijack, if I go to my, this is my like Audio Hijack workflow, and unfortunately I don't think I can zoom this in, so y'all just gonna have to pretend you can read this. But this is my audio signal coming from my microphone and from you all. This is the connection as aircast, and this is a recording, an MP3 recording I'm making. You could also, Audio Hijack has a capability to actually do a live stream out as video, and so you could do what I just said with OBS right inside of Audio Hijack. Now I don't really know why I would, because I think it would be- That's cool. I have no idea you could do that. Yeah, and in fact, it's kind of cool. I don't want to, I'm gonna make a new session here, so I don't interrupt what we're doing, but if you go into, if I drop this on the live stream, I don't actually need the broadcast block here, but you can actually control, like you can put artwork in there, you can control how it, it will put the metadata for the audio onto the video in a player, and it will even do a visualizer. If you all remember Winamp or iTunes visualizers, it's like that. So you can do that inside of Audio Hijack in a kind of automated way, and then you'd only have to be using one tool. The thing is, personally, I think it would be easier to simply record, like go to AzuraCast, broadcast AzuraCast, and then just upload your MP3 recording afterwards to PeerTube, especially because it's audio, it'll only take you a few seconds to upload it in a lot of cases. And then PeerTube can, it can't live stream audio, but it can host an audio file which you can play. And basically what it does is it just shows the thumbnail of the video as the video, and then it sends the audio, which is kind of cool, because you can't actually do that on YouTube. Like if you wanted to do that on YouTube, you would need to drop that audio file into a video editor and like render out an hour-long video, which will take you some time, right? Like that's not gonna be instant. So I do like the flexibility of PeerTube in that case, but it can't quite do exactly what you're asking for just yet, pilot. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's totally fine. It was just something that I was wondering about. I think stream to Azurecast, record it there, and then drop it in PeerTube as an archive is totally fine. So one of the things this is, if this wasn't behind the curtains enough on our recording setup, one of the things I am noticing, it's a little bit annoying is because I am using Jitsi and capturing that into StreamYard, which is our tool that we normally use for these sessions. That's why anyone watching on the watch site or YouTube is seeing like an actual title bar, and that's just a result of the way that StreamYard works. On OBS, I can actually crop my capture to not include like the operating system elements, you know, the title bar and little window buttons and that kind of stuff. It's not really something I can do in StreamYard. So it's just kind of, we start pushing up the limits of like what you can even do creatively in some of these tools. StreamYard isn't really part of the open media ecosystem. It's a paid tool that we use at Reclaim to make a lot of our live stuff a lot easier to produce. But just worth noting that in this case the open media tools offer more flexibility and allow me to do more, which is kind of cool. And kind of starts to get into our next month topic our next flex course is OBS. And very much a part in my eyes of another wing, let's say, of the open media ecosystem. It's not a hosted tool, it's something you run on your computer and you can use it to send video or record video. We'll talk more about it next month, but it is a powerhouse of a tool and it's open source and it's part of what is making this particular stream today work. Before we, but this is kind of the second part of this conversation I want to have today, not just on, hey, look, it works. But I wanted to kind of talk about like what you all think the implications for something like this existing are, I guess specifically in higher ed is what I'm thinking about and interested in. But up until the last few years, self-hosting this stuff was in my view, completely impractical basically, especially the video stuff. But now it's getting easier and easier as we've shown. And so much of higher ed's like video content that faculty and students make end up on either YouTube or different paid services that are institutionally paid for like Keltura or Panopto. There's a lot of alternatives. Ja, I think is one of them. And I don't know, I'm just, I especially as an ed tech who worked at a institution during the pandemic, I've thought a lot about like classroom capture and that kind of stuff in the last few years. So I just want to think of, do you think tools like this have a place in that ecosystem? Is it a replacement? Is it an and, is it filling a different niche? What do you think? I know that Jim, we've talked a little bit actually back in probably November, maybe even October about what this would mean. Less for professors and in a course context, but more in a student organization context. The idea of, for example, AzuraCast, the way we have it, it's an iframe embedded into an HTML5 site. But I know we talked to at least one person who was thinking about how can I centralize different student media organizations as much as possible. So if I have a WordPress site for journalism, if I have event sharing or video capacity embedding the student radio, what are the different options there? Which I know we thought was a really neat idea. And I really do like the idea of if this is something that a student organization is working with, then similarly to, for example, domain of one's own, maybe they're not taking the school radio program with them, but they're bringing with them the knowledge of, oh, if I wanted to keep doing this or something like this in the future, or particularly for peer-to-peer people who want more control over their streaming, taking that with them as they leave higher ed as more skills that they have. Yeah, I like, I mean, one of the things that attracts me too is the idea of your own network, right? Like you have your PeerTube, you have your AzuraCast. One of the things I didn't even talk about AzuraCast is you can do multiple radio programs from one instance. It's a kind of heavy application at times, but that's because you can have multiple radio stations. It's kind of like a multi-site for radio stations. It's not meant really to be one radio station, one install, so that's interesting. But the other piece for me that I love is PeerTube is federated, and it actually not only can be a place where you can bring YouTube videos in for archiving, but also when you create videos, you're not underneath the algorithm of copyright. So fair use has become a kind of like a dead question because YouTube decides it. And I love the idea that universities and schools can reclaim some of that idea of like, oh, we're gonna decide like, what is the context for education? Same with radio, same with streaming, unlike Twitch with own cast, you can stream out stuff. There could be music in the background and you're not getting a cease and desist letter. Like you take back not only the ownership of taking it with you pilot, but also the idea of having a kind of communal relationship of discussing the culture that creates us without being mediated through these corporations that basically want to monetize every little bit of content. Hence they have this really elaborate architecture in place to prevent you doing things that I think is part of the university you need to do. Like it's literally part of the process of learning. So I love it not only as a media suite for students, which I think is huge, just cost wise, a ZuraCast I think would be a fraction of what they pay these other services and also better. But you know, that's personal. I guarantee it is. I helped when I was at St. Albert College, move the college radio from a hugely expensive service to a literal $10 a month droplet on digital ocean. And they were flabbergasted at the cost difference is they were paying for someone to host the radio stream and they were paying a ton of money for like scheduling software, which basically handled like, this is what's playing when no one's broadcasting in that switchover. All of that's built in a ZuraCast and it requires some work, right? They have a person in IT there now, especially now that I've left, that occasionally will go in and run an upgrade, right? And stuff like that. But in the case of a ZuraCast, it's a Docker thing. It's really not that difficult to upgrade. And it doesn't need much of their attention most of the time. Now, keep in mind, this is a smaller radio program. It's not like a major, it's just a student club. But yeah. On that point though, a ZuraCast most recent feature is that they have a WordPress like one click upgrade. So it happens within the web interface. Yes. Oh my God. I didn't even know that, that's amazing. Buster Neese has got that route where it's like, why can't you just click this button and get, because that's basically what it's like, you're just running a command. But now he's like, that command's run from the interface, just press this button. Yeah, Buster's work on streamlining ZuraCast is commendable, I think. I agree. It's beautiful. Because it also, from the outside, it could be like, it's web radio. We've been doing this since 1996. Why is this difficult? And it's like, okay, but it's not just web radio. It's actually like eight different tools that he's like, buried together into one glorious Docker container that is relatively understandable. Like there's a lot of settings in there. If you're setting it up for the first time, there's a lot of little things you want to poke around with like playlists when you're not, you know, in all this stuff, right? But that's because of the capability. Web DJ, like so much. It's insane. We went through the who, what, when, where, why, and how. Not that long ago. We know the vertical and the horizontal. It's amazing to me. And I actually think, to be fair, I think PeerTube and Oncast are similar. I'm really impressed with how relatively simple those tools are. I would say in particular Oncast, because it's sort of problem that it's trying to solve is sort of one thing. It's, hey, let's do live streaming and let's do it well. As PeerTube is trying to be a lot of things to a lot of people, but even that, I will say I'm kind of pushing my own PeerTube instance, my personal one, and doing things with like external storage and stuff like that. But if you're running a relatively basic one, there's not much to know, actually. I mean, we covered it. I know Pilot Nice Session was an hour and a half, but like that is all of the things to know. All of the things that you need as a beginner in an hour and a half is really quite good when you think about it. To effectively administer your own tiny YouTube kingdom, right? Like that's a lot of stuff that's capable there. So they do make it, and most the settings are in a web UI. I don't do much with config files in PeerTube or owncast. It's really cool, or is there a cast? It's awesome. I will say I'm particularly most interested in this sort of, this space that I can see these tools getting to. Right now we're at a place where I think using these tools might make sense for maybe a small conference or something like we're doing, like a small course with distributed participants. That is really interesting to me to be able to sort of set them up the way you want them to work and brand them and stuff like that. And I think that's where they would work really well right now. And maybe also like, these are tools I kind of wished existed again when I was in ed tech at a school where it would often be like, can we do something? Like a faculty member would say like, I wanna do this, but I don't wanna stream it out to just 20 people. Like I want theoretically anyone to be able to watch it but I don't expect more than like 100 people to tune in. This would be perfect and something that I could easily administer. But what I'm really excited about is long term these things, computing power rises and gets cheaper over time, right? We get more of it for less money over time. I'm excited about a day when we can talk about deploying these tools the way we talk about deploying WordPress sites and install it on shared hosting and just be like, yeah, whatever, have another one. Like just install it, clone it. We're almost there with in terms of ease of deploying in Reclaim Cloud, but we're not there with cost yet and it will take time in terms of computing, getting cheaper and things like that. But that's, I can see a world where we talk about blogging tools in the same breath as video streaming tools in terms of cost and that is exciting to me. Yeah. It's interesting too with the own cast that he has gave Congress has actually doubled down on like federated followers and a kind of social sense and like the idea that anytime you spin up your own cast it can immediately say I'm live streaming out to a specific mastodon or Twitter or whatever count. And that's really kind of interesting because it suggests that these are, you could literally spin up and down your own cast and stream for pennies a month. And if you do a regular stream and I like that about own cast and I think that all of these tools maybe not only being cheaper, but there may be something because they share a certain amount of kind of logic of like federation and integration. Like maybe we'll start to see them come together as part of an ecosystem that we're with mastodon or write freely or other things we've been exploring. Like we'll start coming together as a real alternative to the singular monoliths that a lot of people are doing that sharing it now. And that's a super exciting concept that I don't think is too far away these days. Like I think we're seeing a subtle shift and it was like completely how would you say accelerated by the demise of Twitter? And that's an interesting moment, right? That was a before and after for people saying, oh, this Fediverse, maybe it's not just blockchain cryptocurrencies. Like maybe there's something else to it. And I liked that. Even for me, it was eye opening. Yeah, for sure too. I always, I've been fascinated through this course because we've been exploring mastodon for a couple of months now but we're definitely still learning about that too. But through this course, seeing how many of these tools interact with the Fediverse, we didn't even build that into the course because frankly, I didn't know, I don't think most of us knew in this call about what the kick goes for. Can you get YouTube theoretically with it? And I didn't even know only casted it. Zero Cast doesn't, but it has really robust API, robust and relatively easy to use API support that effectively means it's very easy to integrate into the Fediverse. So it's been cool to see like, I haven't, I should maybe put more of it in a discord, but I was messing around with our own PeerTube and through the courses, through this course, I just have my PeerTube being followed by Reclaim.tv. So stuff I make there shows up on Reclaim.tv. And I've also been messing around with I follow my own PeerTube on Mastodon. So when I go live, I see a post in my Mastodon feed and I can just boost it. And then everyone who follows me on Mastodon will see it. And that's kind of cool because people could, A, choose to follow my PeerTube if they wanted to, but B, it also kind of automates my process of like, hey, I'm doing this today. You know, like that in a kind of elegant way. And then what's even cooler is I've gotten comments on PeerTube videos that were done through Mastodon or maybe other tools. I don't even know, but that I can tell are federated because they have the federated handle. So you can reply to a PeerTube video post and it will show up as a comment in the PeerTube video. It's super, it's super cool. And I think kind of going back to some of the stuff that Chris Aldrich was talking about in our last community chat on Mastodon. And one of the takeaways from that, from me that he mentioned more than once was like, this is all possible because of ActivityPub, but everyone's implementation of ActivityPub and the federated stuff varies at the moment. And so a lot of it requires you to like, set something up and see like, okay, what does that look like? Like what is PeerTube talking to Mastodon look like? And what does say PixelFed, which I haven't even played with, talking to PeerTube look like, does it work? Does it, what does it look like? That stuff that I think is still right for exploration and is fun for me as a technologist, but I'm hoping to see standardized more and become more understandable because I can't imagine explaining what I just did in like one sentence to somebody that it's a lot, right? But it's cool, it's cool stuff. That's all I'm saying. I'd like to think about in terms of, I guess, so one of the things that I completely understand and I know that it's useful to people is the idea of you have different handles across different Fediverse projects, basically. So your handle on Mastodon will never be the same as your handle on PeerTube, no matter what, it just isn't possible, even though they follow the same similar formats because they're working in two different instances, because they're doing two different things and that makes sense. But one of the things that I think would be nice is in addition to the ability to say, I'm on Mastodon and I'm following your PeerTube on Mastodon, Taylor, I want to have one account on Mastodon that can pull in everything. And I wonder if that would be something like, the thing that I'm thinking of is the way that you can pull blog posts into Twitter through RSS, if that's something that you're interested in. And I don't know if that would be a feature of the Fediverse ever, but if there's a way to use RSS to say, sure, I'd love to follow Taylor's PeerTube, but I also want to follow him on Mastodon and I also want to do a bunch of other stuff. And I don't want to make sure, I don't want to have to follow a bunch of accounts and I don't want to make sure that he's boosting every time his PeerTube pushes. So is there one Mastodon account that I can follow where all of Taylor's stuff comes in or? And there's a couple of things with that too, right? Because there's Fediverse folks who have been in this space for a long time are often talking about like, we default to Mastodon as the Fediverse tool because it's the most popular and probably maybe the easiest to understand. Even though it's not that easy to understand. But I think some folks would push back on that and say, well, if we do that, then it wins and it's the only one and once there's only one, then this whole thing kind of doesn't matter because only one player controls the space, right? It's kind of like browsers, right, with Chrome. It's like, okay, Chrome is open source, but the only one contributing code is Google. So it's better than a not being open source. But I think it would be interesting to have some kind of like tool because I think right now, the way I handle this is via the domain, right? Like you can find me at video.jadend.me and I theoretically could deploy Mastodon to like social.jadend.me. But one of the things that I've seen people doing, and I haven't messed around with it yet, but I want to is you can set up four words in with just static HTML files that will actually let you find folks on at different places. So theoretically I could have Taylor at jadend.me set that up in Apache in the file manager in Cpanel and that would go to Mastodon, like my Mastodon handle wherever it is. I haven't done this yet, but that's really exciting to me for folks to own that handle, right? What would that look like from a non-U user perspective? Like what would that mean for me if you set that up? You could put Taylor at jadend.me in the search thing in Mastodon and you would find that and that would be my handle for all intents and purposes. And I would find everything associated with that? Well, whatever I had set up. So in this case, just the one like Mastodon account it was pointed to. But what would be interesting to me is some kind of application or maybe it's integration in Mastodon or some other tool, but it would be interesting for me to say, take ownership of these different places and say like what if I could say go into Mastodon and say I have a peer tube and here's the handle and then some kind of way to verify I am who I say am and then I now show up as one unified thing. But maybe you can click on it and sign, oh, these are videos from peer tube. It's channels from one identity if that makes sense. Yeah, well, that's what I'm thinking of and I guess I'm sort of thinking about it as another RSS feed, I guess. That's how I think of it too, but I'm keeping it a little bit agnostic to the technology, right? Because RSS could do that. Activity Pub is kind of, this is my layman's understanding of Activity Pub, but I kind of think of it as like two-way RSS where it's like you can go there to check out stuff but also the stuff can tell you to go look if that makes sense. RSS feeds have to be pulled and every five, 10 minutes, hour, every two hours, whatever whereas Activity Pub can reach out to you and say, hey, there's a new thing. That's kind of how I think of it. It's more than that, but that's how I think of it. And so I think it's very similar in concept and right now you could accomplish what you're saying by setting up your own API integration. You could say, well, I could just have my Mastodon profile send out a post every time I have a PeerTube video and avoid the entire federation system. But what I would want is these tools to be actually easy to use and say, I wanna link in other federated accounts here and when they reach out into the Fediverse, make them all look like one unified identity that is Taylor but maybe flavor them with, this is a video and this is a picture or whatever. Yeah, I think we're talking about the same end goal here. Yeah, I also think we've spent 10 minutes talking about the Fediverse in this open media ecosystems stream. It's interesting though, I think. Yeah, it's interesting too though, pilot what you're bringing up and you and Taylor are talking about is actually something that I'm watching right now on Mastodon explode. Chris Aldrich wrote a post about full RSS feeds from Mastodon instances with open RSS that was then boosted by Dave Weiner who invented RSS effectively. And I tried to go to Chris Aldrich's blog and it was down because of probably all the traffic but like the thing that's nice is these conversations are actually happening on Mastodon and that space is starting to kind of get a critical sense of talking about RSS. Like we were joking with that not too long as a group about how like, oh, we want RSS, we want to return to it and like some of these tools, like the commenting thing you're talking about Taylor, like that was a dream of early RSS that you could post somewhere a comment and then it would automatically syndicate to another site. And so like people could own that comment who maybe it wasn't just on your blog. Like the idea of RSS is this space where you could actually have these distributed conversations in your own space. Like that was the logic. You didn't have to go to Twitter, you didn't have to go to Facebook. And Mastodon is relighting or rekindling that sense of like, wow, there's a new day. It's interesting to me too because like, I think blog spam, like comment spam kind of killed that dream in its tracks a little bit. Like I don't actually think it's a big effort. I think blog spam is not that bad if you use a kismet on WordPress. It's not that much to manage for someone like me, right? Like maybe if you have an enormous following then it's too much, but I don't know. I can't speak to that, right? But the syncing of posts of comments was hard though. Yes, yeah. And so what's interesting to me is the idea of like, cause I use a static site for my blog and I use discuss and I've been looking for comments and I've been looking for an alternative cause I don't like discuss business model very much. It's advertising based. And what I'm kind of landing on is people are now making integrations for Hugo and Jekyll that just simply pull in Mastodon replies. And in various clever ways. And I'm like, I think that's my new comment engine, right? Because it's not that big. Mastodon is probably well known enough with the type of person who's gonna comment on a Taylor Jaden blog post that that's good enough. Like yes, they have to have an account on a Mastodon instance, but good enough. And I think that and maybe using something like the indie web, web mention system might be my replacement for comments. And that is those are two systems that are kind of totally divorced from my blog tool, right? They're not built into Hugo. They're not built into WordPress. If I was using that not built into ghost but I like the idea that a conversation can happen there and it is authenticated like a person has to make an account and so I'm not just gonna get random nonsense there most of the time. It's cool. This is shifting back a little bit. Maybe a lot bit at this point but I was thinking back about what Eric said in Discord about being the Panopto admin and I wasn't the Panopto admin but I worked on a team with the Panopto admin at back at Carlton. And we were not just sorry we were not just setting up Panopto at the time we'd had it for like six to eight months by the time the pandemic started but we weren't really using it and then it exploded, excuse me for a second. And professors found it difficult to use students found it really annoying and hard to navigate. And so I'm going back to the idea of where these tools might fit in higher ed and Taylor we talked a little bit about like the managing of PeerTube who gets an account, how many people can sign up what the permissions are for each account but the idea of to my mind PeerTube is a lot easier to navigate than Panopto and pretty good for making because the idea is similar to Azurecast it's not one instance, one station PeerTube is one instance many channels and the idea of a school basically getting to say have a YouTube, put your stuff on the YouTube but it's ours. Put your stuff on the YouTube. Yeah, put your stuff on our YouTube and what? Exceptually, yeah, that is more coherent possibly. Yeah, and I think it is, yeah, I agree. Just as opposed to Panopto is a paid service that sucks it's not fun. Maybe they've made it better in the last two or three years but I hated it. I think so I was for a brief moment interacting with Kaltura when I was at S&C and S&C got it during the pandemic for Zoom recordings is a place for those to live and go and what I struggled with and it's the promise of those tools is that it's like if someone at your institution is thinking about something to do with video, the answer is Kaltura or Panopto or Yuja and I kinda tend as a technologist to hate tools like that it's the LMS problem again, right? In fact, it's almost worse because they are their own little LMSs that live inside your LMS so it's like double LMS hellscape and I admire what they're trying to do which is to say video is hard and it is, it's complicated you can do anything you wanna do with video on our platform and we just handle it but in my opinion that is normally a promise that no one can actually solve because you run into that right away it's like well if what you wanna do is have one camera or an audio source, whatever that is and put it on a thing or record a Zoom call we can do that. If you wanna do anything more than that it becomes way more complicated right away and so I've always kinda advocated for like I would rather us have a ecosystem of tools that people can understand and understand what their limits are and what they do well and why they might wanna choose one or the other and I understand that that means people have to know more about using them but I do think the people that wanna do more with video that's gonna be a better solution for them and the people that don't wanna do more with video end up using two simple tools rather than one not very simple tool. Yeah. I actually, I wanna say one thing really quick because I just remembered and it was something that we were talking about a little bit in the peer tube thing was captioning and closed captions and I will say for Panopto their auto-generated captions are comparatively quite good at least the few times I use them they weren't perfect but the idea of I can run their closed captioning setup on this video and I'll have to edit it but I'm not gonna have to essentially re-transcribe everything which I do things using me and that's something that you know YouTube can't handle here too too currently can't handle and then we know that it's very, very hard and so that may be a longer term project or a lower priority project or something they don't have the resources for right now that my mic is fuzzy that's interesting and not great but I don't think I can fix that right now. I hear you're fine. Oh, okay. That's good then. There's a total amount of places that my setup may be messing with that so. Okay, that's true. That's fair. But yeah, the idea of I mean, what's your trade-off to easy to manage tools that you can run for much less that don't have all the crazy bells and whistles and that's fine or something that's clunky and difficult to use but its accessibility features are if not perfect, pretty good. It's the trade-off that happens so often with any kind of tool that I almost always fall on the side of I would rather spend 15 minutes educating someone on how something works and that's gonna be better for them, better for me. It's what we do here at Reclaim. It's what Domain of One's Own I think is designed to do. It's what I did in IT when I worked IT at colleges because that's how I found myself more successful. It's the teach a person to fish, right? In some way and it's I'm not gonna pretend that's always the actual answer because sometimes that doesn't scale in the way that you want it to but I think there's all, I think coming from that aspect you're always gonna find more success and say, okay, how do we teach more people to fish rather than how do we make this so easy no one ever has to understand anything about it? It's like, I don't know if that's possible in some cases. That's how we wind up with Facebook, right? And I don't want more of those. Yeah, it's funny. Tim and I once had a conversation not that long ago, where, you know the question came up like, do we wanna try and do something at EDUCAUS or some of these other places? And I think what you start to realize is that's kind of like enterprise tech. Like that's the tech that has to work. That's the tech that has to do everything. That's the tech that can do beautiful stuff like that like accessibility and like even Slack the way Slack huddles are able to grab and completely subtitle and closed caption everything is mind blowing. It's really impressive. And I wonder if tools like PeerTube and even Jitsie and stuff will get there at some point maybe. But I think we're thinking our community is often the folks who are doing this a little bit more DIY who wanna experiment a little bit on that edge who don't need the clean, completely one touch like the one button studios like they don't need that because they're trying to build out an idea of what's possible for those people in their campuses who don't want the LMS or don't want the all-inclusive solution. And there's a whole community that often underserved because it's like do this or there's no other alternatives and EDTEC fills that gap. That's what the EDTEC groups mostly are doing is working with those people who wanna experiment. And I think these tools are really in that wheelhouse. And I like them because they also point to some of the future we're starting to see emerge with Federation, with self-streaming, with really bringing down that CPU cap that you were talking about Taylor. So like actually we could maybe afford to run our own little Twitch or our own little YouTube like before that was impossible to imagine. But with PeerTube, if you are an institution and then you have an EDTEC group that wants to do this on the side of their desk, 50 bucks a month isn't crazy, right? Like that's not like stop the presses, we couldn't do that. That's like, oh yeah, we can run our whole video infrastructure for a few examples of stuff that's possible for 600 bucks a year, sign me up, right? Like that's not crazy. And let's not forget that Twitch and YouTube are run by Google and Amazon, the biggest cloud vendors in the world. And they don't make money off of Twitch and YouTube. They operate at a loss with all of the computing power that they own, right? And I only say that to me, to me sort of the only sustainable way forward as more and more people make video is that less of it is hosted in centralized places because we're gonna see the screws turned on those services. Yes, things get cheaper and it gets cheaper for them to do. And I really hope Twitch and YouTube don't go away because I think they're amazing services for that are actually goods for humankind in a lot of ways. I'm not saying that they need to die but I think knowing the position that they're in and the position we are in in terms of we can do these things is important. Yeah, I'm actually gonna pull in another thing again based on something that Eric said in the chat about how storage is the big problem with video which is also what we've been talking about but Taylor, I know that you recently set up your peer tube to push your video to a third party storage place. And I think you said it was back plays and I know that there have been a couple of like wrinkles that still need to be ironed out but the idea of we do sometimes have people who come to us and say, hey, we wanna store terabytes of data and we say, don't know, there are better places that are more equipped to do that and we can have your site and hook it up. There's plugins, there's ways to bring that in. So to say it's all or nothing with one of these services isn't necessarily true. You can have your own peer tube and maybe find a more affordable third party storage system, solution system that then, there are compromises, there are ways through that I think. And you get, using external storage like that lets you some flexibility, lends you some flexibility, right? So you're not just stuck back in the Amazon wheelhouse, you can use Amazon S3, you can move the stuff from there to back plays is what I use. I'm looking right now, I pay currently I have like 300 gigs of video uploaded to back plays and I pay about a dollar, less than a dollar a month for that. So it's, yeah, last month I paid 81 cents. So very cheap because I pay a 10th of a cent per gigabyte, something like that, or it was a 10th of a cent, I don't remember, it's less than a cent per gigabyte. And you pay for other things, you pay for outgoing video, right? So that could be a big one, but luckily I don't have thousands of people watching my videos, I don't pay very much for outgoing video, but I could move to a service that's more competitive. If that was the case, I would pick up my videos and move them to Cloudflare, which doesn't charge me outgoing fees. It charges more for storage, but less for outgoing. You get that choice, right? It's democratizing, it's the WordPress of storage in a lot of ways, right? You can do the same things in multiple places and take it with you as you need, and that's powerful, and it's not simple to set up right now, right? And I'm not gonna tell you that, oh, moving between them is simple. Hell no. I'd have to manually copy stuff over, probably with a tool like R-Sync or R-Clone, and then I'd have to edit URLs in my database right now appear too because it doesn't have an automated way to say I'm now over here, but you could do it, and those tools will only get easier to use over time, hopefully, right? I guess I can't say that for sure, but in my experience, that's the way, that's the direction they go. And I will say, having some experience, yeah, storage is such a big thing, and Calterra and Panopto and those things, they will sell you storage in large quantities, which is important, but it is not cheap. It's certainly not competitive, because usually they're using storage like S3 as their actual, their infrastructure in a lot of cases, but I will say in many cases, it's you're a little bit more tied to them as a vendor. I've seen issues like cleaning up storage in bulk ways, in automated fashions on services like that, because you don't have as much control over the actual tools. You just kind of have to say here's a list of 1,000 videos, but as you might imagine, like coming up with that list is kind of difficult to do and automate yourself, or if you do, you have to automate it according to their API. So then when you move to a new vendor, you have to rewrite all of your, you have to have your infrastructure team rewrite all of their programs that manage those things, because it's a new API. It's, and I don't, like trust me, I realize that like what Kaltura and Panopto can do for higher ed is huge and not replaceable by throwing, not replaceable today, by throwing peer tube on a server and calling it done, like no, those tools do a lot more things. And captioning, like you said is a huge one. I was also similarly really impressed by the capabilities of that in Kaltura when I, when S&C got it, especially because you could search the transcript. Like it was so cool to show students that you could look at an hour long lecture and literally control F through a video, right? Like mind blowing. And then to see some folks say, well, why would they watch a whole video? And it's like, well, you have to make the whole video compelling. But that's a whole other thing. That's really cool stuff. I hope those tools, those features come to things like peer tube and at some point. But yeah, I don't, I'm not suggesting that the bigger platforms don't have a place, but I do think that it's good anytime you have the capability to take ownership over this stuff, it's only gonna benefit you down the road in terms of time and money. Well, that was a lot, we went in a lot of places. Amanda, do you have anything to add? I feel like we're talking, like. It was all mostly covered throughout, you know, everyone. I mean, the main thing that I was just kind of hoping to add was building off of the idea of community and how it's nice that, you know, people from different institutions can actually work together. I think that that is a lot of, there's a lot of potential there in higher education that isn't taking advantage of, it's also locked down and especially within LMSs. And so being able to have, you know, maybe a radio station across that, you know, has student admins across different schools that are all interested in the same thing. And, you know, that they're able to do that all together in the open, I think it's really cool. So just hope that more institutions collaborate and take advantage of these types of tools. Yeah, that's a really good point, an important one. These tools kind of work the way the web works in a way that the LMS doesn't typically and makes hard. Yeah, cool. So we're at an hour roughly. So I think we'll wrap up, but I really appreciate anyone who is watching and who watches this later. If you're watching live, I'll have the recordings of the various outputs today, owncast and all that stuff. I'll put it on the reclaim ed.tech blog post for this week and we'll, I'll post it in discord as well. So if you're curious to see like, oh, what did it look like on owncast? You can see that. I'm sure that there may not be perfect. Cause like I said, it's all streaming from my computer. It's kind of a, it was a technical challenge to get this to work in this way. But I'm kind of glad we got to experiment with it. And it seems like it went mostly smoothly. So cool. I'm pretty impressed with how smoothly it went given all that you were doing. Wow. I'm a little nervous. I was a little nervous, but it seems fine. I did some testing to make sure that it would work. But you know, things happen, right? Cool. Well, I'm gonna shut down the various streams here. So thank you all and hi to everyone in discord. See you. There's so many things to turn off.