Open-source Twitch alternatives

PeerTube is a free, decentralized and federated video platform, developed by Framasoft as an alternative to centralized services such as YouTube, Dailymotion and Vimeo. It is a network of many small, interoperable video hosting providers, called instances, and it is described as community-owned and ad-free.

Users can upload videos and have them streamed anywhere, with descriptions and tags that make them discoverable across the whole federated network, not only one instance. Live streaming, including permanent streams, is supported, and a player can be embedded on other websites. Viewers can follow channels from the Fediverse, such as Mastodon, without an account on the instance hosting the video.

PeerTube uses ActivityPub for federation and peer-to-peer technology in the browser to share bandwidth between viewers. It is written in TypeScript with Angular and released under the AGPL-3.0 license. People can join an existing instance or create their own, so it fits both self-hosters and communities, and demonstration instances are listed.

Owncast is an open-source, self-hosted live video streaming and chat server for one broadcaster. It aims to work as a single service you run yourself, with streaming and chat included, so you keep ownership of your content, interface, moderation and audience instead of relying on a large streaming platform.

It works with any broadcasting software that sends video over RTMP, the protocol the major live services use, and OBS, Streamlabs and Restream have been used with it. The topics list HLS streaming, chat, ActivityPub and fediverse federation. The backend is written in Go and the frontend in React, and a quick-start guide plus a demo are available.

Owncast is licensed under MIT and deployed on your own server. The README advises using a tagged release rather than the develop branch when you want a stable version. It suits independent streamers, communities and organizations that want a branded, self-run live stream with built-in chat.

Frosty is a mobile Twitch client for iOS and Android. It exists because the official Twitch app does not show emotes from the 7TV, BetterTTV and FrankerFaceZ extensions, which leaves many chats unreadable because only the emote names appear as text. Frosty renders those emotes and badges as images or animations.

You can browse followed streams, top streams and top categories, search for channels and categories, and watch live streams with chat. Chat features include emote and mention autocomplete, an emote menu, filtering of chatters, local message history per user, and options to block and report users. The player supports theater and fullscreen modes, picture-in-picture and a sleep timer, and there are light, dark and OLED black themes.

The app is written in Flutter and Dart with MobX for state management. Building it yourself requires registering a Twitch application to get a client ID and secret. It is licensed under AGPL-3.0, and the author accepts donations through GitHub Sponsors and Buy Me a Coffee.