The important part first: On Monday, 25/08/04 this lemmy instance will close down. The communities on here will move to piefed.world. If you are one of the few people with an account here, migrate this weekend if possible
This always was a bit of an experiment in how to give to the Fediverse community. In the end, both this instance, and my mastodon instance weren't really used by many people - while videos.abnormalbeings.space had and still has a small community.
This led to me changing priorities to PeerTube - moving to a new server sniped from Hetzner dedicated server auctions, with a massive upgrade in HDD space, which should easily support a growing community there. Bonus is, that the server is actually cheaper than my old plan - although I will sadly have to can dedicated backups, the costs for backing up the amount of data would quickly become prohibitive. (Most of this is still paid for out of pocket on basically a subsistence-level income from disability payments.)
But this switch comes with a huge drop in CPU power - it is still enough to support PeerTube for now, even with streams enabled, but considering the other services have barely seen any use, their additional overhead isn't really justified going forward.
My personal account, as well as the communities I moderate on here will move to piefed.world.
CHANGES TO VIDEOS.ABNORMALBEINGS.SPACE:
New user policy: Going forward, users will no longer have to be be manually approved, although upload will be disabled by default. Please use the contact form on site if you want to upload videos - with a quick explanation what you want to upload - basically, anything legal goes. Even after that, to stay on the safe site, your uploads will have to be manually approved at first, just to prevent shenanigans in that space. After a few manually approved uploads, you will be added to trusted users and can upload to your hearts contend.
Streaming transcoding changes: Due to the downgrade in CPU power, the generated stream resolutions have been reduced to two resolution option (1080p and 480p) from the old 3 options (1080, 720 and 360p). Transcoding of VODs (both from streams and regular uploads) should remain unaffected.
Unlimited uploads: Barring any abuses, the space available should allow for all approved users to basically upload unlimited amounts of videos to their hearts' contend.
Bigger redundancy contingent: The upgrade in space gives me the opportunity to do what I wanted to do to begin with, with this whole Fediverse self-hosting experiment. A whopping 5TB are now reserved for video redundancy from trusted servers.
So, as closing thoughts: Running these instances was immense fun and even the moments of frustration always resulted in learning experiences. Going forward, the new, tighter focus on PeerTube as a platform will hopefully help it grow into a great place for people to watch and create on the Fediverse! I will update this post with additional information over the weekend when and if it becomes available, and the way federation works, the text content should remain available from other sites in the Threadiverse after the server closes down.