Taking notes on yet another inherent unsustainability issue that ails FOSS and the Commons.
I recently found out that the ActivityPub Conference 2020 that used to be available at the conf.tube Peertube instance, are no longer available and may be lost altogether, alongside with other conferences that were published to this instance by other people. APConf 2020 had many interesting talks not only worth archiving, but many still relevant and interesting to watch …
I found out about the missing vids when looking for Let’s Play and Win Our Own Game by Darius Kazemi, which offers a brainstorm, ideas, and strategies on how the fediverse can become a different place than what the corporate social media molochs and Big Tech in general have to offer society (which today in 2026 is amply clear is deep threat to democracy worldwid, authoritarianism, and even total erosion of the fabric of society).
So I created a SocialHub topic about the matter to see if the videos are still around …
And I found out what happened via toots I posted to the fediverse, which I’ll quote from below. Coincidentally this coincided with a Hacker News submission titled PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform and subsequent discussion with 360 comments, which highlight the deep challenges that exist to this day in our fight for digital autonomy and against the unhealthy dominance of Big Tech.
I particularly included the Hacker News discussion as the comments make clear many of the challenges that alternatives to Big Tech face to guarantee our digital autonomy, esp. alternatives that are costly to maintain, such as video platforms.
The organizer of FOSS North took over the conf.tube domain, when that peertube instance shut down.
@tobsan: I’m the main organizer of @foss_north. We were offered to take over the conf.tube domain name and then we also migrated all of our old conf videos to peertube.anduin.net where we were given some space.
IIRC, the person hosting conf.tube said it was too much work and too expensive to keep doing. We don’t have the money or energy to keep the full conf.tube going, but it would be sad if the domain name was lost, since we also had links to it.
I responded with:
Hey thank you @tobsan for reaching out and for organizing FOSSNorth!
I fully understand this and I’m there myself unfortunately. #FOSS inherent unsustainability is also one of the 3 core themes I involve myself with regarding elaborating Social experience design i.e. #SX at https://coding.social. The other themes being the intersection with #SocialWeb and the #Commons.
The other day on HN there was an interesting thread on #Peertube and both the economics of running a server, and producing #POSSE Peertube-first content by creators was discussed at length. It more or less boiled down to the viable and valid use case for doing so was having the ability to afford it, spending the time and energy, and not caring about engagement. And that this would not become a threat to #BigTech platforms like #Youtube any time soon. Tricky dynamics to change with huge network effects for content creators to overcome on YT.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48759634
I checked if the APConf 2020 videos were on archive.org but they aren’t indexed such that they can still be watched I think.
It is a bummer to lose entire conferences. It is a type of video content that’d ideally be kept available long-term, more so than a random video someone uploaded at one time. I think there must’ve been a bunch of other conferences on that instance too, that are now lost.
Perhaps if the content still exists, and someone has time and opportunity to volunteer bringing it to another #Peertube instance, it can be rescued and preserved. Should be a peertube instance that has a more sustainable backing and operations.
I’ll update the #SocialHub thread I made, copying in these messages and change the titlle of the topic to be about the general problem: that a wholly volunteer-driven bunch of passionate would-be world improvers is insufficient to win the fight for digital autonomy and freedom on a shoestring.