by Blender Dumbass

Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".

I'm writing this article for Odysee users. Because here are some shady things that I ( and many other people ) see about the platform.

Problems with traditional websites

YouTube, BitChute, Vimeo, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms are basically just folders on somebodies computer to which you can copy your files. Mainly video-files, but in some cases other files too. This person or company has a direct access to this folder of files and can delete them or alter them at any time without your knowledge, or without asking you.

If you are using this person's or company's computer to publish something that this person or company disagrees with, you have a potential risk of this person or company deleting your files. And therefor taking away your freedom of speech. So some solutions have been proposed.

• Host your own website. Most basic solution, but even that sometimes can get under attack from governments.

• Host your own Tor website. Works like a charm, but there is no discover-ability features. So most people will not know who you are or where to get to you.

• Host a federated website. A bit better with discover-ability, but still vulnerable to governments.

Premise of LBRY

While Torrent is a good thing to share popular files and Bitcoin has a new way of storing data online in a way that will not be deleted ( Blockchain ) LBRY tried to combine the two to make a publication platform where people could publish something outrageous and still be discover-able. Where YouTube-kind videos could coexist with porn films and political stuff from any side. Where censorship will be almost impossible.

How?

Well torrent works by having individuals host files that they are downloading. And if they do not turn off the torrent client afterwards, they keep hosting those files. So if government, or anybody else comes to shut down an original poster of the file, there is a great chance that the file is still available to download. If especially a lot of people have interest in that file. LBRY uses torrent in the same way. The sources of LBRY SDK actually contain torrent. LBRY adds another layer.

Blockchain is a good way to make a record of something undeletable from the internet. Bitcoin's blockchain is basically a huge file that is hosted by million computers around the world. And if somebody wants to join the ecosystem directly they need to start hosting this ginormous file too. In Bitcoins case, the file only contains the history of transactions. In LBRY case it contains more data. You can think of this data as torrent magnet links with some meta-information like title and description of the publication.

What this allows to do is to have the searching and discovering of torrents easy. Therefor make it possible for lesser voices to get bigger. And so on and so forth.

The problem with that approach is that it also requires to have a cryptographic coin since somebody has to host those ginormous blockchains.

Mistakes made

• To make a more user-friendly program. Instead of the LBRY clients connecting directly to the blockchains, they instead connect to HUB servers that connect to the blockchains. Which means that we now have a yet another piece of infrastructure that has to be maintained by the good will of the people to operate properly. Otherwise the only HUB servers are operated by LBRY.inc or Odysee.com and this is not decentralized. It doesn't help also that those HUB server are power-hungry beasts. Which kind of makes sense if you taking about direct interaction with both millions of connecting LBRY clients and also direct connection to the blockchain. But it makes hosting them very impractical.

• To insure that a server-based program stays decentralized and nobody takes it into a direction of corporate proprietariness, a good license for the project's source code should be chosen. Mastodon and PeerTube useAGPL which makes it impossible to make a proprietary service from their sources. This is why Threads ( the Facebook's attempt at a Mastodon instace ) takes them a long time to connect. They have to literally reverse-engineer the protocol to connect to it, or they will have to make Threads free/libre software ( open source ) like other instances. LBRY didn't even want to try fighting, they chose MIT license from the beginning. And even though there were elements under AGPL originally, like the comments servers. They were swapped to a different server written on MIT because this way somebody could make a proprietary, not decentralized website or service upon the foundation of LBRY. And the fact that they were actively avoiding AGPL hints at some plans that they had prepared for LBRY.

• Odysee.com was launched which diverted people from using LBRY directly into using a website that accesses something, maybe LBRY on their behalf. This totally threw the decentralization out the window from the beginning. But at least in the beginning they pretended it to be LBRY.

Odysee's take over

Originally when I signed up there was LBRY Desktop and LBRY.tv a website where you could access the LBRY network from a browser. But the website was very keen to tell you that the website is not a good way to use LBRY. And that the only way the protocol will survive is if you will use the LBRY Desktop app. Since otherwise the whole premise breaks apart.

This was an interesting compromise. You can send somebody a link to your publication, even if they don't have LBRY desktop installed. But they will be encouraged to install LBRY desktop once on the site.

Around this time SEC was already threatening LBRY, but nobody from LBRY.inc could disclose the lawsuits. What they could do is try and make some plan B for the protocol to survive. And that's when Odysee opened up. And people using LBRY.tv were kindly asked to hop over to Odysee.com instead. And then LBRY.tv closed down.

Originally Odysee and LBRY.tv and LBRY Desktop were hosted and maintained by the same company LBRY.inc. But there was a big chance of SEC killing the company all together, which resulted in a very questionable split of LBRY and Odysee. Technically on paper it makes sense. If SEC wins and LBRY.inc will need to break apart. Odysee is a different company, and everything survives.

The problems though only began. Odysee originally had a proud mention of "POWERED BY LBRY" in the very bottom of every page. Suddenly this disappeared. Odysee didn't promote the LBRY desktop. There is no Odysee Desktop app instead. You have to use the website. And the various Odysee apps on mobile do not run the SDK, they connect instead of Odysee's own API. Basically the whole LBRY thing is not even present at all on Odysee.

Despite that Odysee still operates as an LBRY client of sorts. But it doesn't need to technically. LBRY network is now very unstable and mostly doesn't even work. For example I can't even connect to it directly for over a week. But Odysee works just fine. The reason for that is that Odysee keeps a copy of every file hosted via LBRY and can host it directly from their server. They don't actually need LBRY at all to operate.

What is next

If LBRY is truly dying, staying on Odysee doesn't make any sense. They will just turn into a yet another proprietary website like YouTube or Vimeo. And there will be no more freedom of speech. Like if it even exited in the first place on Odysee. To be honest. Since I saw that Odysee.com has no porn, I was already skeptical of it as the main front-end to something that should be uncensorable. But then things like Odysee's Geo Blocked List appeared. And everything just gone down from there.

I think Odysee is just trying to be a yet another YouTube at this point. If LBRY survives I might be using it instead of Odysee. But will that mean that I will no longer be on Odysee? Will that mean that I will be only on LBRY?

To be honest I don't believe that LBRY survives.

Happy Hacking!!!

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