I just realized it has been a full year since I blogged last. Time flies and I will try to do (much much) better this year.
My last entry was about foss-north 2025 and now foss-north 2026 has just passed. It was a successful event and Tobias really helps bringing new energy to the event – including a whole crew of volunteers.
During the foss-north events all talks are recorded. These are then made available on YouTube and on a peertube instance. Historically this has been conf.tube which was provided by a kind supporter to the cause. However, now the costs has exceeded what is reasonable, so it was migration time.
We’ve looked at taking over the full peertube instance, but quickly realized the costs were too high for us as well. Instead we took over the domain (thank you!) and one of our speakers offered to host us on his instance. Thus, all past foss-north videos, and the new ones for 2026, have been migrated to https://peertube.anduin.net/c/fossnorth/videos .
So, what about migration? The intra peertube transfer failed – much because the aging conf.tube setup did not want to produce the 360GB export. So we had to take another path.
What path you ask? Python scripts! (of course)
So first, we created a Python script storing all URLs from conf.tube. Both for playlists and videos. Then we created a script collecting the corresponding links from YouTube.
Since the new peertube instance does not have direct import from YouTube enabled, the script downloads the video file, metadata and cover picture from YouTube, and then uploads the video to the peertube instance with the metadata and cover picture. As this is a fully automated flow, it is very convenient.
(for 2026 I adapted the script to sync a YouTube playlist, which is very convenient)
The final output from the migration scripts was a set of redirection statements for nginx which is now deployed to the conf.tube server. This means that all old links to foss-north material at conf.tube should redirect to the corresponding video at peertube.anduin.net, so hopefully no links are dead.