Your channel

Everything here is in Settings, in the part about you.

Your page

Your channel has a page where viewers watch you while you are live and see your profile when you are not. Its address is /user/<name>; Your page lets you choose the name, or leave it blank to use your username.

Your profile picture is generated from your account until you upload one, and Remove picture goes back to the generated one.

Title and description

Set on the Go Live page. They belong to a stream: they show on the dashboard card, on your page, in link previews when somebody shares your page, and in going-live announcements while you are live. Saving them while live renames the stream going out.

When you are offline your page shows no title -- you are not streaming anything. What you saved is kept for your next stream, which starts with it, so the last stream's words carry over unless you change them.

A stream that drops and comes back within the instance's stitch window (15 minutes unless your admin changed it) is the same stream: one entry in your stats. If you changed the title while it was down, it goes on under the new one. A longer stop ends it, and going live after that is a new stream.

Going-live announcements

When you go live, the instance can tell people. Each of these is optional, and each has a message you can write yourself -- leave it empty for the default.

• Notifications to your followers' browsers. In the message, {{title}} becomes your stream title and {{name}} your username.
• A webhook -- Discord, or anything that accepts one. Paste the webhook URL your server gave you; one per channel. Remove webhook stops it.
• A Fediverse post from your own account (Mastodon, GoToSocial and others), once you link it under Fediverse. Use {{name}}, {{title}} and {{url}}; if you leave {{url}} out, the link is added anyway.

Separately, people on the fediverse who follow your channel's handle (shown under Other instances) get a "went live" post in their timeline. Settings lists who follows you from other servers.

Other instances

If this instance is connected to others, your stream can appear on their dashboards too. Let my stream be shown on other instances is yours to turn off: with it off, your stream stays here only. It cannot add connections -- the admins of both instances decide those.

You can also follow people on other instances from Following elsewhere: type their handle (name@their.instance). The follow stays pending until their server accepts it.

Past broadcasts

If the instance offers it, Keep my streams as past broadcasts (under Past broadcasts in Settings) keeps each stream you start from then on, after it ends, and lists it on your page for people to watch again. It is off until you turn it on, and turning it off stops the next stream from being kept -- one in progress keeps what was decided when it started.

Below the switch is every past broadcast of yours, with what it takes. For each you can:

• rename it -- it starts with the title your stream had;
• choose who sees it: On my channel lists it on your page; By link only keeps it off your page, playable by anyone you give the link to;
• delete it, for good.

Each shows a picture taken from the recording itself, a little way in -- past the black first seconds and any countdown -- once the stream ends. Past broadcasts kept before pictures existed simply have none.

If your stream drops -- a crash, a lost connection -- and you go live again soon after (15 minutes unless the instance says otherwise), it continues the same past broadcast rather than starting another.

Where the instance makes them, Also keep them in smaller qualities is under the same switch, on unless you turn it off. After a stream ends, smaller copies are made of it, so people on a weak connection can still watch: the player picks the one their connection carries, and a Quality menu under the replay lets anyone choose one by hand. Until they are ready the replay plays as it was streamed. They count against your space.

The instance may keep them for a limited time, or keep a limited amount per streamer; the list says how much yours take against that limit. When a limit is reached, your oldest go first -- a stream in progress is never cut short, it may just not be kept. An admin can also hide one of yours, for moderation; it then says Hidden by an admin, nobody but you and the admins can watch it, and only an admin can list it again.

Your own storage

Where the instance allows it, Your own storage lets you keep your past broadcasts in a bucket of yours -- any S3-compatible service: AWS, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, Wasabi, MinIO. Each one is uploaded there as soon as the stream ends. The instance may keep a copy for a while as well; once it no longer does, your past broadcast plays straight from your bucket, which can stay private -- viewers are handed links that work for a few hours.

Enter the endpoint, region, bucket name and a key pair that can write to it, then Save and Test: a small file is written and deleted, and the page says what your bucket answered. The keys are stored encrypted and never shown again; leave the secret empty when changing anything else. Forget this bucket stops using it; what is already in it stays, since it is yours. Deleting a past broadcast here deletes it from your bucket too, as long as the keys still work.

Your stream stats

Settings, Your stream stats (or /stats) shows how your streams went. It lists your latest streams with their peak and how many different people watched, and each of your past broadcasts has a Stats link to its stream. Open one to see:

• Viewers over time: how many watched, every 30 seconds, with the peak and the average.
• Who stayed: of everyone who came, the share still watching after each minute.
• Watch time: the total, and how long a typical viewer stayed.
• Unique and returning viewers: returning means they watched one of your earlier streams too.
• Chat messages and new followers while you were live.
• On other servers: when another server relayed your stream to its own viewers, how many watched there -- now, at the peak, and for how long -- for all servers together, or pick one from the menu. It is kept apart from your own figures, and marked when a server did not answer, since the figure is then lower than it should be.

Viewers are counted without being identified: each one is an anonymous code that tells this viewer from that one and nothing more. Someone watching from another server counts once for that server. Figures are kept for as long as the instance's admin chooses (90 days unless they change it; the page says how long), then deleted, and they go with your account if you delete it.

Your figures, in your own tools:

• Download as a spreadsheet (CSV), under the list, gives one row per stream: start, end, length, peak and unique viewers.

• Prometheus, Grafana and scripts: make an app password that reads your stream stats only, and give it to your tool as a bearer token.

  • /api/v1/me/channel/metrics answers in Prometheus's format: whether you are live, how many are watching here and on servers that relay your stream, your followers, and your streams and time streamed as running totals.
  • /api/v1/me/channel/stats and /api/v1/me/channel/stats.csv answer as JSON and CSV.

  A ready-made Grafana dashboard for it is linked under your stats (/api/v1/dashboards/streamer.json): import it in Grafana, then pick your Prometheus and the job that scrapes your channel.

  For example, as a Prometheus scrape job:

  - job_name: my-channel
    scheme: https
    metrics_path: /api/v1/me/channel/metrics
    authorization:
      credentials: vlap_...   # the stats-only app password
    static_configs:
      - targets: [your.instance.example]
  

Your chat

Let viewers without an account chat decides whether people must sign in to say something. Turning it off makes your chat read-only for them -- it never makes your stream private. More in Chat.