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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

It's cool to see them self-host. I'd love to see a Peertube instance for tech conferences though, mainly for content discovery and comments.

Sidenote: I barely watched any conference talks this year because the video and especially audio quality is so atrocious for many of them. A decent streaming/recoding setup on PC/laptop is surprisingly hard.

80% would have had much better quality were they shot on a recent smartphone instead.

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> It's cool to see them self-host.

But they're not self-hosting? They're using media.ccc.de, which is a well known community streaming/hosting platform for tech conferences around the CCC/hacker scene [1].

Unless anything that's not YouTube or Twitch is seen these days as self-hosting...

[1] - https://media.ccc.de/b/conferences

You do know what the ccc is, right? That's about as close as one can come to self hosting these days, from an organization that won't use Youtube or similar on general principles.

Seems "self-hosting" is another term that is going into widespread usage to mean something else than it's original term.

The way I understood it (before today I guess) is that if I'm not CCC and I'm hosting something on CCC's infrastructure, then I'm not self-hosting. If I'm organization XYZ and I'm hosting something on XYZ's infrastructure, then it is self-hosting.

One would think the name makes it obvious, but maybe the term has been skewed like many other terms today.

The closest one can come to self-hosting today is hosting it yourself, not hosting it on others infrastructure.

I get the distinction, but in terms of entity size and willingness to 'self host' their own servers, the ccc is pretty tiny and very much a labor of love, compared to any randomly chosen top 30 size commercial, for-profit video streaming platform on the Internet.

the ccc is even its own ISP, it has its own ASN and you can peer with it. They're self hosting right down to almost the most fundamental levels of what putting content on the internet is.

https://www.peeringdb.com/net/15547

Sure, I agree with everything you have written here and I'm familiar with the CCC.

But that doesn't make "Arch organization hosting content on CCC's infrastructure is self-hosting" a true statement. Self-hosting is hosting it yourself. It doesn't depend on the entity size, the willingness nor if you run your own ASN, self-hosting simply means what it says on the tin. And if you're not hosting it yourself, you're not self-hosting.

Technically yes, then they're not 'self hosting'. But say they rented a dozen powerful 1U servers on a fast pipe in colocation somewhere, and did it all themselves, would they be self hosting? Or no? Because they wouldn't own/run the datacenter itself, or the ISPs and IX point that were their upstreams. Or would it be self hosting only if they owned the bare metal versus leasing it?

Anecdotally I have seen a lot of instances where medium to large sized non-profit, open-source project related organizations become the umbrella organization containing a number of smaller community initiatives within them.

Think it's important we set the context to be around Arch Conf, where we're talking about hosting recordings from the conference.

In this case: Yes, if they do run their own servers for storing the content, they are self-hosting. No, doing your own peering is not needed to be classified as self-hosting. No, you don't need to run your own data center to be self-hosting. Unless you want to self-host the servers themselves, then yes, running your own data center is needed.

I think the most important point is "hosted" vs "self-hosted" here, where hosted is letting someone else run the servers where you put the content, while self-hosted is you running the servers where you put the content.

Yes, the CCC is self-hosting. But we're not talking about the CCC here, but about Arch Conf.

While this is hosted by the ccc, they also have the content on their own server, including not only the talks themselves but also the presentation as a pdf, notes, music: https://static.conf.archlinux.org/2020/archconf/

Thanks for the link, the Neuro mix is a real banger

>It's cool to see them self-host. I'd love to see a Peertube instance for tech conferences though.

Someone emailed me and asked if I could upload the conference videoes to https://conf.tube/. So there is one I believe.

> because the video and especially audio quality is so atrocious for many of them

Of the few ones you watched, which had atrocious audio quality? I've watched many of them, and the video has been fine for all the recordings, and the audio quality obviously depends on the speakers setup, not the processing/encoding/quality of the video. But of the ones I've seen, the audio has been perfectly fine to be able to understand what's being said.

CCC has been perfecting the art of "recording, streaming and storing conference talks" for many many years, so it would be weird if it suddenly took a dive in quality. Would like to see what videos you're talking about here.

Edit: I just quickly went through all the videos on the page from the submission, to check the video/audio quality. All of them have perfectly OK video/audio quality while 2 videos could have been better mixed/mastered (volume too low) but nothing raising the level of your speaker wouldn't be able to fix.

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