LBRY does to publishing, what Bitcoin did to money | Hacker News Reader

LBRY does to publishing, what Bitcoin did to money

lbry.com

50 pointsgjvc41 comments

So LBRY turns publishing into a massive pyramid scheme that wastes an obscene amount of power, then?

Not as bad as Steemit though

You joke but I genuinely don’t know what the site is about based on their front page.

https://odysee.com/ is an example of a YouTube like page built in LBRY. I don't know much about it, but it seems to play videos.

It seems to attempt to play videos. The one embedded on the front page referenced would not load. Not a great look

Oooh, LBRY allows narcotics traffickers to launder the proceeds of crime, and supports North Korea's effort to nuclearize?

Is gold a pyramid scheme?

Gold has practical and decorative uses

Bitcoin/Crypto have plenty of practical uses.

Seems like it will end up primarily being CSAM (child sex abuse material), pirated copyrighted materials, and other content that reputable hosts restrict. Unclear why anyone who has legal content for which they own the rights would want to use this.

If you did publish your own original content, what stops someone else from downloading it and then re-uploading it with a lower fee?

It does nothing more for CSAM material than IPFS. Both can adequately block these from nodes too. It doesn't provide anonymity either, so I don't see how this will be primarily used for CSAM.

> Unclear why anyone who has legal content for which they own the rights would want to use this.

It's Not YouTube. That's pretty compelling.

> Unclear why anyone who has legal content for which they own the rights would want to use this.

Because they don't want to use traditional content distribution channels that require content creators to agree to one-sided terms (in favor of the distributor).

"LBRY does to publishing, what Bitcoin did to money (lbry.com)" That is, nothing

You forget that it unlocked the full potential of moving crime money.

imagine if I said this: "cell phones have unlocked the full potential of sending crime communications".

should we ban cell phones?

Yes please, can we?

Because of the fundamental nature of DRM, the LBRY toolchain is not able to actually enforce the idea that users will pay a fee to view content. Perhaps one user will pay once, but that is not the same as what LBRY is selling to independent artists.

That's what I was wondering.

why couldn't people turn this into a "lending library" where they download the media, then re-sell the access token, maybe 100 times a second?

Is it computationally expensive to get to the media each time?

I like how the harsh reality meets the blockchain dream:

FROM: https://lbry.com/faq/censorship-resistance

> How could LBRY be censored?

> An internet service provider or network operator could conceivably censor traffic to the LBRY network entirely ....

FROM: https://lbry.com/faq/trending

> Tag abuse and failure to apply appropriate tags will not be tolerated. Your channel may be filtered and rewards revoked.

FROM: https://lbry.com/faq/dmca

> Once validated, we will block access to content in any LBRY Inc. owned applications upon receipt of a DMCA takedown notice. [...] LBRY Inc. will also remove any data related to the infringing content from servers within its control.

> The data may still exist on the original publisher's computer (and anyone who may have downloaded it prior to it being blocked) but will not be accessible through any LBRY Inc. controlled applications.

so it is "censorship resistant" only when you use un-offical clients and do not care about being recommended.. which is to say, not very resistant at all.

Never trust a site with autostarting audio.

What browser are you using that hasn't blocked autoplay audio? Firefox, Chrome, and WebKit all didn't on my computer.

FWIW, Firefox has become unpredictable in it's blocking of autoplay for me. It works for me almost all the time it seems, but every so often something will autoply anyway. I can't figure out the exceptions, and don't know why Firefox allows them. It seems fairly straightforward to me.

Chrome on mobile. I do block scripts on my computer, but on mobile I haven't bothered so far.

What did Bitcoin do to money?

Ooh. I've been waiting for something like this for damn near two decades. It was the original promise of the internet: free and open access to all information, regardless of whether that makes people uncomfortable. And this protocol even gives you control over monetization options.

Still, they have a big hurdle. It all comes down to whether it'll be adopted.

First impressions of the MacOS app: Loading time was long, but onboarding was effortless. Threw me right into the app.

Immense disappointment when I realized it was for video, not books.

Gave a video a try, "A better way to split firewood."

Since there's no URL bar, there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to link someone to a video.

But! There's a web version: https://odysee.com/@SicCooper:1/3d-all-stars-super-mario-64-...

Seems like... youtube. Hmmm.

First impressions are ... surprisingly positive. This is somehow an almost-complete, fully working clone of Youtube. There are missing features, but I can look past that.

The recommendation engine is obviously the biggest weakness, since there's probably not much content to recommend. But I found myself watching https://odysee.com/@atthespeedoflife:b/it-may-not-be-adhd-pa...

Pleasantly surprised to find a 2x speed setting. The production quality of the video is good too. No problems whatsoever.

This got me curious: How hard would it be to set up my own channel? So I clicked sign in, and was delighted to discover they have a "sync my youtube" checkbox.

... Unfortunately, after creating my account, there's no sign of where the "Sync my youtube" feature went to. I checked the box, but there wasn't any prompt or further info. Well, back to watching.

The production quality on these videos is actually incredible. This one has 6 views: https://odysee.com/@AlphaPhoenix:f/why-are-metals-so-stretch...

"Why are metals so stretchy?"

I got a bit suspicious, so I checked youtube. Yep, it's on there too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn1Y6zIS91g&ab_channel=Alpha...

They have 14k subscribers, which isn't huge, but is significantly greater than "nothing." Did LBRY somehow convince people to sign up and cross-post their videos, or are they simply hosting random videos? Now I'm curious where it's hosted.

This is interesting enough to give a fair shot. I'll be watching it closely.

Their FAQ is a solid resource: https://lbry.com/faq

I'm mostly curious how they pulled off a fully-working clone of YouTube. That's an incredible achievement, setting aside all the questions it raises.

I see that Google banned them, which honestly makes me want to support LBRY more. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24594663

This is pretty much what I think of it as well.

Disappointed to see it’s for videos and not books. It’s not worth giving 30% of a book price to a company just for serving a 1 MB file.

You can actually use it for any type of file, but the main / most popular use case is video.

Have you seen Freenet[0]? It's been around for two decades, providing decentralized content.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet

LBRY is not just for videos. You can upload files to LBRY if you want and they are shown on your channel feed.

>Did LBRY somehow convince people to sign up and cross-post their videos

Yes they did. When you create a channel they give you the option to do this.

We have a sync program (lbry.com/faq/youtube) that automatically mirrors content for creators if they authenticate their youtube channel - that's where most of the content comes from, apart from those uploaded directly by users. YouTubers are now also adopting it more and doing exclusives with us.

Thanks for the awesome feedback, gave me a huge smile!

If you share your channel or wallet address, will send a tip over!

Hmm. Alright, I'll give this a try. My address is bJvR8mykuvCyDhsbGum7eJNGkiSrC7uM8g; thanks!

I'm still amazed that it's a fully working clone of youtube. Is there any info anywhere about... who made it? How long did it take? What's the tech stack like? What were the hardest parts?

As a totally minor point, I originally started with the MacOS app, and it had a poor experience due to my own fault: my harddrive was almost full, so videos kept freezing in the first few seconds. I almost unfairly blamed you, but perhaps a warning might be good if there's no space for the temporary video buffer. (I assume it's streaming to disk.)

But, in terms of bugfixes or feature requests, that one probably shouldn't be prioritized. ~Nobody is out of harddrive space. Just grasping for straws at things to mention in case it's helpful.

Rooting for you. Good luck. I'll try transferring over my videos, and I'll consider linking to LBRY (or is it odysee?) by default for my videos. It's a risk -- if your platform goes down, all my backlinks will go with it -- but I like the david vs goliath aspect.

That's actually a tough decision. Pretty much everybody in the world expects a youtube link for a video, and has integrations for it. I wonder what the embedding situation is like for this... I'll try it out.

By the way, the odysee front page is far better than any other youtube competitor so far. https://odysee.com/$/tech is particularly interesting. Keep up the quality, and this might have a shot.

All of the code is here https://github.com/lbryio

The blockchain is C++ (bitcoin fork)

The SDK is python

The apps are JS (desktop/lbry.tv/odysee.com), and java/swift for mobile apps.

The disk space issue is definitely something that has been talked about for a while. https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-sdk/issues/1311. As the lead maintainer of https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-desktop, it's the last issue I'm waiting on before the 1.0 release!

"LBRY differs from the status quo in three big ways:

  1. Coupled payment and access. If desired, the person who publishes to lbry://rhapsody-film#e1029aaa08bef8e9225efcbfb94a895e9bbdc8ea can charge a fee to users that view the content.

  2. Decentralized and distributed. Content published to LBRY is not specific to one computer or network, making LBRY robust to failure and disruption.

  3. Community controlled. No party other than the publisher (including us) can unilaterally remove or block content on the LBRY network."

I wonder if this scales well to micro-publishing, say as a protocol for an unmoderate-able twitter.

Given that it's a blockchain, I doubt it scales to anything.

Oh be nice, it scales. To 7. Yep, just 7.

How does it address misinformation and disinformation? Seems highly irresponsible if it’s not designing for this.

How does the Apache web server address misinformation and disinformation? Seems highly irresponsible if it's not designed for this. /s

Apache web server by itself does not provide content. It also needs:

- A machine to run on -- which needs money and a real person. This adds some (small) measure of accountability.

- A way for people to find the site. So it must be linked enough that search engines pick it, or shared via some other method. I feel this is the primary we address misinformation -- by not linking to it.

It seems that LBRY claims to not require either. So a misinformation/disinformation video will stay there forever.

it's going to be so mindnumbingly slow and impossible to monetize that it'll turn all the people away who buy into disinformation. The only good thing coming out of all this blockchain stuff is that it's too bad to actually be abused because it scales to about ten people

It doesn't even address racism or (gasp) inequality!

Neither does the wheel, btw.

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