this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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It's odysee, a frontend to lbry, a sort-of decentralized alternative to Youtube. Which seems very enticing, because an alternative to Youtube is badly needed.
Unfortunately, at the moment it is completely overrun by religious nutjobs, Nazis and other assorted scum. It is not by its nature an alt-right service, but it does attract all those who would be banned anywhere else.
It is whoever uses it the most. If it gets overrun by alt right people it is an alt right service.
Cue in the obligatory "This is a Nazi bar now" reference: https://x.com/Iron_Spike/status/1646817528482770944?s=20
Unfortunately alt-right crypto weirdos have coopted the term "decentralised", and so it is with this site. It's a crypto-based... video... hosting... platform? I cannot for the life of me figure out how it works other than that it mines crypto in the background while you have the site open and if you have an account, you get a cut of the crypto you mined.
I have tried looking into it, but they don't explain anywhere in their promo materials, it's literally just "earn while you watch!", which... yeah no thanks. I've been on the internet and paying attention for more than 5 minutes, I know that grift when I see it.
"Decentralised" isn't enough, you need a way to ban people that is also decentralised, and that's where federation comes in.
I don't know if they're eventually going to coopt "federation". I wonder if that's the ultimate test of a social technology - if it can be coopted by reactionaries. The less able they are to do so, the better it is.
It doesn't mine crypto in the background. The hosts mine the crypto, and you get some rewards from watching. If you collect enough, you can donate it to your favorite channel which earns them money. It is like Reddit gold but actually useful.
Also, it is somewhat federated. The underlying blockchain containing video metadata is decentralized and used as thread between federated instances. Odysee is one of those instances, and they can block and ban users and videos from showing up on their instance, just like Lemmy.
In other words, you can make an Odysee alternative with the same videos but filtered to your liking.
That really doesn't explain how it works. So... the host mines crypto as well as sending you videos? What is the economy supposed to work like? What does the blockchain actually achieve here? Why do people host in that case? Where do they explain this?
Anyway, I'm still not interested in crypto anything. The moment I saw it was blockchain based I noped out pretty fast. I'm guessing a lot of people do and that's part of why it's such a reactionary cesspit.
Like we don't need blockchain for this; regular federation already works.
The blockchain is a requirement because without it, your video can be taken down entirely by the platform. Like for example Louis Rossmann's video about Grayjay which google falsly claims violated YouTube ToS when it clearly doesn't, or when people get false copyright strikes and lose monetization.
With the LBRY blockchain, Odysee can hide your video and ban you from their platform, but your video will still be up and visible on other platforms, and monetization still works, everything you've earned is not lost. It is your video, not the platform's video.
If it was only federated, whichever instance you uploaded to will have the ability to take down your video entirely which can be an issue if you are a critic of the instance itself or if you are a whistleblower, not to mention that video hosting is incredibly expensive, and adding federation on top of that is downright monetarily impossible. The p2p aspect of LBRY solvea this by distributing hosting costs to uploaders and other "seeders."
The blockchain itself acts as a public record of uploaded videos and where to download them, like a torrent tracker, and records cannot be deleted, so the blockchain doesn't host the videos themselves. The video itself can be taken down from the original source but since it is also p2p, the video can remain in circulation.
Another thing about blockchain technology in general is that it provides you with a way to identify yourself and authenticate transactions without providing your real name, email or credit card. You need neither of these on Odysee yet can still earn money.
Peertube is also p2p, so the videos can be hosted apart from the host instance, and there's nothing stopping peertube instances from maintaining a distributed ledger of references to videos without the blockchain.
Everything you say blockchain does can be achieved via distributed plaintext ledgers. It is solving a problem that doesn't exist.
As for the earning money part, eventually you do have to connect your personal details in order to transfer crypto to a usable currency, so that problem isn't really solved either.
Plaintext ledgers aren't immutable, and someone has to distribute and manage them. That's a single point of failure and vulnerability to censorship, not to mention a real pain to synchronize if it was federated ledgers.
The users will never need to redeem their LBRY tokens, thus not be required to disclose personal information, whereas if you want to donate with any non-crypto service, your credit card, address, name, etc must be disclosed. It is a many times easier to just press "donate" without having to set up anything, and give away tokens to a content creator just like that.
Also, you can purchase mullvad VPN services for example, without ever having to transfer crypto into Fiat or disclosing your name. I would for example never want my credit card linked to a VPN. That defeats the entire purpose of a VPN.
There are a ton of online services, subscriptions, etc that accept cryptocurrency, so it isn't exactly useless until turned into Fiat.
You can also transfer it all to a Monero wallet and after that the thread ends.
Immutability is irrelevant if the point is to maintain a record of posts to prevent censorship. The only thing that matters is that some instances keep the record. Bad actors could try to lie about the posts, but that doesn't delete the ledger from other instances.
And no, no single instance is responsible, that's what it means to have a distributed ledger. Distributed ledgers are already a proven technology that is extremely robust against censorship. You may have heard of them, they're called bittorrents.
In fact, federation is also a kind of distributed ledger since once content federates a record is kept by any instance it is distributed to. It's a solved problem and not even that hard. Synchronisation consists of, "here's my latest posts, keep a record of them please". This is such a basic concept and I don't know why you called it a "single point of failure". It is exactly the opposite of a single point of failure.
Privacy is not guaranteed even with Monero, and you're still getting paid in crypto which is inherently unstable because the only thing it is worth is what you can sell it for, so it goes through boom-bust cycles constantly, and the immutability - when forks aren't happening - only serves to enable scams. To defeat that crypto people have created banks, defeating the point of a zero-trust system.
There's no public trust in it and it takes enormous carbon footprints to run, so it's unsustainable on so many levels. I don't want to support crypto on any level on principle, so no, I don't want LBRY tokens. A lot of people feel the same way, and looking at the population of Odysee, a large number of the people who are on board are a bunch of right wing assholes.
Hard no.