Media Empire of One’s Own: A Federated Approach with PeerTube and Beyond

What would it take to build a media empire of your own? Where you have complete control of the origin and destinations of your content? This session explores how creators can use federated tools to host, distribute, and connect media content outside the limits of corporate platforms.

We’ll begin with PeerTube, a decentralized platform that can serve as the foundation of a personal media network. Participants will learn what’s involved in setting up PeerTube, who can provide hosting, and what to consider when managing scalability and distribution. From there, we’ll expand the conversation to how WordPress, using the ActivityPub plugin, can serve as a publishing and distribution hub, raising the question: should you build your own DIY federated media site, and what are the trade-offs?

The session also looks at the role of RSS in the Fediverse—bridging the gap between traditional syndication and newer ActivityPub-based distribution. We’ll discuss how video publishing might integrate with federated servers like Mastodon and speculate on where ActivityPub will be by late 2025 and beyond. Finally, we’ll consider some hosting solutions, like Reclaim Hosting or Fedihost, in combination with content delivery networks (CDN), that would allow you to take ultimate control of your media and distribution.

Attendees will leave with both practical workflows and a broader vision for building their own federated media empires—small yet scalable, and entirely their own.