Owncast Social Features

Owncast allows people to follow, engage with, and share your stream with others on what is known as The Fediverse, a decentralized network of services.

What it supports

1. People can follow your server.
2. Your followers show up in the "Followers" tab on your stream's page.
3. You can send out posts to your followers via the admin.
4. Your followers will automatically get notified when you go live.
5. Your followers can share that you've gone live with their circle of followers.
6. Actions such as following, liking or sharing get exposed within your stream's chat.

Why use Owncast's social features?

Own Your Audience

Unlike traditional streaming platforms, there's no risk of algorithm changes hiding your content, sudden platform policy shifts, or losing access to your community. Your followers are yours.

Reach Beyond Your Site

Your stream becomes discoverable across the entire Fediverse network. Millions of users on Mastodon, Pixelfed, and other federated platforms. When your followers share that you're live, it spreads organically across their networks without algorithms gatekeeping your reach.

No Extra Accounts Needed

Your audience doesn't need to create yet another account on yet another platform. If they're already using any Fediverse service like Mastodon or Pleroma, they can follow your Owncast server with their existing account.

Direct Communication

Send updates directly to your followers about upcoming streams, special events, or important announcements. No competing with millions of other creators in an algorithmic feed, your followers see your posts chronologically where they already are.

Community Building

Engagement from the Fediverse (follows, likes, shares) appears directly in your stream's chat, creating excitement and social proof. Your followers and shares are featured in front of everyone, making them feel valued as part of your community and encouraging others to share and follow as well.

FediAuth

Enabling FediAuth allows your viewers to authenticate using their Fediverse accounts when participating in chat. This helps maintain a consistent chat presence across sessions, browsers, and devices. This is especially useful for moderators.

How do people follow your Owncast server?

Any person on the Fediverse using a service that is compatible with following Owncast, such as Pleroma or Mastodon can follow your server.

Learn more about The Fediverse.

How it works

The Fediverse is an ensemble of decentralized and interconnected servers that are used for social networking, microblogging and more. While each server is independently hosted, they communicate with each other.

Each Owncast instance operates as a completely standalone server with a single user that can take part in the Fediverse, exchanging posts and notifications with any participating user who is interested in them.

Any user on the Fediverse that is on a compatible server can follow any Owncast server that has this feature enabled.

Composing messages to your followers

By clicking the Compose button in the admin header you can create a post to send to your followers. This could be used to tell people when you plan on streaming, or to remind people that you're still live.

Engagement

If somebody follows you, likes a post you send out, or shares any of your posts while a stream is live it will display that these actions took place within the chat feed. This can be disabled under the social settings.