Today I’m happy to announce the launch of my new PeerTube instance https://video.travisshears.xyz ! A self hosted instance of an open source web torrent backed video hosting site.
The goal: a home for my screencast tutorials and personal videos. By selfhosting I avoid tying my content in YouTubes censorship, privacy, and ad driven culture problems. This is part of a bigger push in my life to move away from big tech and be more independent. 💪
I knew about PeerTube for a few months but what pushed me over the edge to setup my own server was a video by Luke Smith. I figured I have enough sysadmin experience to get my own up and running. Turned out pretty easy. There are good docs here.
The seeding, federation, and following other instances features are really exciting. While watching a video you actually seed it for others making their stream faster. While I admit a bit rare occurrence in for my videos, still cool! Since PeerTube was built with the ActivePubSub protocol in mind you can follow me and my channels via a mastodon account and get updates in a twitter feed format. Also built in RSS support ✅. To help foster the community instances can follow each other. A cross pollination of sorts. My instance follows Luke Smiths’s https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/videos/local so his videos also show up on mine. Hopefully students checking out my tutorials stumble upon something enlightening in his videos.
*Note for subscribers of my YouTube channel I will slowly be privating and removing my content from Youtube. Please stay tuned the following channels to stay up to date with my videos.