… similar to the vdo.ninja software used in the on-going Guile course?
I track that area of technology as much as possible but I had never heard of vdo.ninja and so others must know of some other resources I have missed.
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I should say I have zero idea what admin load is generated by adding channels in discuss.
I’m a bit confused. “Channel” is an IRC term. “Category” would be a Discourse term.
My suggestion: just start a new topic about decentralized tech in General, e.g., “What decentralized tech are you using?” or something similar.
Yes, Category. I don’t use Discourse much so I was carrying jargon over from another system.
The question re a Category was intended to be more broad than just a thread in General because I have noticed a bit of a leaning toward decentralized systems within the SystemCrafters community.
Sure, I’d be interested 
I like decentralized tech, especially the kind that’s geared towards personal use. Either a Category or a Thread, I’m there for it.
I don’t know vdo.ninja very well, though the name’s popped up in my feeds a few times here and there, but how is it decentralized?
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I’ve only started to dig into the technicals but it looks like the streaming of audio+video is p2p – certainly no central server for this portion – and perhaps the only centralized aspect of it is the web service/url shortener for pointing the browser to the shared session.
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Ohhh yes of course, I think I heard that vdo.ninja uses WebRTC under the hood, right?
That’s right, in the default case, each participant in a vdo.ninja session is connecting peer-to-peer to each other’s machines using WebRTC. This means that for small groups, the call can be both high quality and low latency depending on each participant’s bandwidth.
For larger-scale calls like the Guile course we just had last night, there’s an extra layer called Meshcast where the “director” of the call can injest all the video/audio streams from each participant and mix them into a single stream that each participant sees rather than connecting to each other for video.
The vdo.ninja docs are pretty detailed in describing all of the settings you can use to tweak the experience. It’s pretty incredible for being a free service!
I’ve still yet to dig into the tech details but what I can say right now is that I was pleasantly surprised with the result. It would be interesting to do a call with all cameras running and Brady Bunch Mode enabled to see if the quality was maintained as that is the scenario I see most frequently with, for instance, Zoom and with mixed results at > 10 participants.