Firstly, I did look at topics to see if this has been covered and since I didnt see anything ill take a stab at it!
I run a few vacation rentals here in Florida. Although I dont provide typical cable in the rentals most primary tvs are equipped with fire sticks which enables guests to watch content such as netflix, prime,youtube etc. As I have personally weaned myself from youtube,google,etc for multiple reasons, (1-censorship/personal values 2- to support lbry with my viewership) I was wanting to be able to view content on my flatscreen and I am wanting to find a solution to provide the odysee/lbry content to my guests in the rentals.
I realize that us americans are generally becoming lazier, my idea is to make it easier to check out what is on Odysee/Lbry and more cumbersome to watch the other, probably thru a fee.
Anyhow, I am in the process of setting up a home server where I can self host our website and platform, I dont know if it is possible or practical to integrate? is the solution to create a raspberry Pi device to offer content to guests?
Some of the more salient content for our guests would be hosted on our channel. that will include orientation about the vacation rental, like where bandaids, wine opener, extra pillows can be found. or information on checkout and other topics. ALSO, there will be content produced that highlights sights and activities from the area.
I realise my question is multi-faceted. we are very busy and expanding. with each new guest and family I will be able to provide them with a link to our channel exclusively on Odysee/Lbry when they make the reservation and hopefully they can easily access the content as they are guests, have questions answered and get ideas for their stay.
obviously content will be available to potential guests through our website,etc as they make informed decisions.
so… in short! Can I make it so in each rental/room guests have easy access/viewability to the Odysee/lbry platform? if so…HOW? if not…will it be possible in the future?
Honestly, if censorship is your reason to move from Google to Odysee, you’ll be better off setting up a PeerTube instance and follow as many other instances as possible, which you can actually self-host. lbry.tv is confirmed to be discontinued, the desktop app might probably be discontinued at some point too (considering it took them months to release the latest update to catch on to Odysee), and odysee.com has censorship problems.
They hide entire channels whenever a special snowflake flags a video as “mature content”, they claim to only hide the individual content and only on odysee.com, except in reality they apparently hide entire channels network-wide over it (at least they give human response by email after you point them out, so I have to give them that).
And the DMCA policies are equally worrying, since censorship of mature and “copyrighted” (in quotes because copyright is a scam on itself) content only is exactly how censorship evolves to YouTube’s standards and beyond in the long term.
As a vacation rental you might be fine for a long time on both YouTube and Odysee, but keep in mind that nothing lasts forever, so my advise is to make sure you backup your videos locally regardless of where you decide to host them.
You can resort to the classic throttling tactics, but be aware that you can get sued over it, especially since I heard that in Florida anyone can sue you over anything (not sure if true, but I’m not an American myself).
It’s theoretically possible to install and host “lbrycrd” locally, but from personal experience it’s SLOW!!
I experimented with fetching comments from LBRY, YouTube, and PeerTube.
I skipped Bitchute and Rumble due to the lack of API support.
YouTube and PeerTube comments combined loaded within 1 second, but LBRY alone took 20 seconds, which for a website to show on is outrageously slow.
You can use embeds, which never hurts.
You can do all sorts of methods that have existed for decades.
Bookmark Odysee and make them clearly visible on the frontpage, put QR codes for guests to enjoy, throttle YouTube on the network level, you actually don’t need any LBRY or Odysee specific functionality for any of what you want to accomplish.
Not sure if it’s possible with Firestick, but there are browser extensions that automatically redirect from YouTube to Odysee if the Odysee video got imported from YouTube.
Doesn’t work if uploaded to Odysee directly though.
However, good to know is that still lots of content available on YouTube today might not be available on Odysee, so you might either get massive amounts of complaints or the customers might end up using their smartphones on a 4G connection instead of your TV systems.
And in the worst cases they’ll end up boycotting your company which would lead you into bankrupty, so be careful with what you want to accomplish, because as long as YouTube remains the dominant platform, it’s unfortunately still a gamble with no guaranteed success.
Thanks for taking the time to respond…
Im guessing that english may not be your first language or perhaps you skimmed over my post. I suppose I could have crafted a better commentary/question. I can guarantee you that our guests will never boycott us because they cant get youtube. Why are you bring that platform into the equation… it is a NON issue in regards to my ideas.
but I am in 100% agreement with your comment re. copyrights
Odysee is just a buisness/marketing.
Desktop App wont be depracted cause it’s core of LBRY P2P protocol. Mayby it would change if browsers could support RAW UDP so we could integrate LBRY SDK into browser
Not sure why you get angry for providing advise though…
Correct.
Incorrect.
Still, better safe than sorry.
Context.
At least that’s something.
Electron apps all run off a stripped down Chromium base, so does the desktop app.
I can’t say for sure whether they’ll depracate the app or not, my doubts about it came up after noticing that odysee.com and even lbry.tv got updated regularily, but the app took 2 months or something to finally catch on.
Not saying your conclusion is wrong, I haven’t looked into PeerTube in particular, but I’ve seen decentralized Youtube alternatives that I like more than LBRY from a technical perspective (and wrote an article about it), but as to your arguments…
And what are supposed to be the implications of that, other than that the odysee branch will be merged into master one day?
Eh… maybe, it could also just mean they have limited resources.
What do you mean by “network wide”? They probably do scrape them from their wallet servers (although, isn’t there a NSFW option in Odysee/LBRY desktop?), but I doubt they fork the blockchain every time someone flags a video.
I don’t disagree about copyright being a scam, but the DMCA happens to be the law in the U.S, and LBRY Inc. is a corporation, not a rag-tag group of anarchist hackers. What do you expect them to do?
That said, I’m pretty sure the way they handle DMCAs is by delisting videos from wallet servers, not by scraping them from the blockchain. Feel free to host them if you want.
Nah. I had it running locally too. It’s about as fast as your internect connection allows. Syncing up to the top of the blockchain from 0 takes about a day or two. It’s the wallet server syncing that’s slow.
Just so you know, I do recognize the efforts made and I do recognize what is attempted to be achieved, and I’m not saying that LBRY is necessarily a bad product, but what it is right now is mostly centralized.
It’s true that there is a blockchain, but there’s also a lack of selfhosting your own backend AND frontend, and therefore the ability to set your own rules on your own instance while at the same time being interconnected to each other.
Self hosting a frontend isn’t quite the same as self hosting an instance.
You should look into PeerTube for your understanding.
In the same matter, I can actually build a self-hosted frontend for YouTube, use their own API to gain the ability to login, watch videos, see and post comments, manage videos, and so on, which is exactly what Madiator does here.
The difference with LBRY is that it’s open source and made in React.js, so it’s simply a matter of changing the config file to change the name of the instance, and maybe change the homepage to feature your own channel (which by the way is documented in LBRY’s developer documentation) and compiling the web interface.
Considering the LBRY team themselves confirmed it, that’s going to be your homework then.
Come on man, it’s literally a React.js app, you can literally deploy the desktop apps for all operating systems and the web using the same source code.
Better yet, their own build instructions even confirm that.
“Network wide” as in all over the network.
I’m not talking about forking the blockchain or having an option for NSFW or not, I’m literally talking about the entire channels being hidden away.
So make it appear as if the certain channel has never uploaded any videos, make it not appear in search results at all, and if you search for the exact name of the channel it’ll show up as just the text “hidden channel”.
The weird part is that despite all of that, you can still view the videos of that channel if you access the video URLs directly.
If they claim that “everyone has the same amount of control”, then they shouldn’t be able to hide the channel, and it should have been possible for the channel owner to unhide it without the need to send them an email about it asking why it got hidden in the first place.
One of my close friends experienced exactly that.
Better yet, I had to stand inbetween as a translator due to a language barrier.
The “rag-tag group” (is that even a valid English word?) of “anarchist hackers” (pretty interesting vocabulary by the way), which I assume you mean “non-corporate hobbyists” is exactly what PeerTube is for.
Think of it like hosting a phpBB forum, but with the ability to federate between instances.
I still believe that would have been a way better solution, so the LBRY team would focus their business model as a developer team, and let everyone else host their own instances.
Problems solved, as DMCA wouldn’t even work that way.
“Hey LBRY team, I’m the CEO from Netflix, and I demand you take this whole list videos down OR ELSE”.
“Dear CEO from Netflix, we are only tool developers, so you’ll need to contact all the separate instances #notmyproblem”.
As an experiment, try accessing any of the taken down videos in this report:
Are you sure they’re not scrapped from the blockchain?
Feel free to try other reports, there’s quite a lot to try.
Strange…
On my end it was unbearably slow.
I know it’s not slow for Odysee, it’s clear as day it isn’t, but it definitely was on my local machine.
Your article does say that you need at least 16 GB of RAM for the wallet server, which is the total amount my PC has, so maybe related?
Also, how would one even be able to run it on any type of VPS?
And for my part I do want to acknowledge there are legitimate criticisms of LBRY, especially with how you phrased them now. I think that some people go too far when they call it “fake”, but on the other hand I do see where their concerns are coming from. I just wanted to clear up what (in my opinion) are real issues LBRY does have, and which ones are blown out of proportion or not actually existring.
That’s true, and in that sense you’re right, Madiator’s instance isn’t a good example as it’s still relying on LBRY’s wallet server. But if you follow my How To article you will have a full self hosted stack of a lbry.tv instance (how long it will take it to sync up with the blockchain is another matter).
Well, give me a few hints where to start then, because I don’t understand what the issue is even supposed to be. The code for both lbry.tv, and the deskop app are hosted on the lbry-desktop repository. We both agree that they decided to discontinue lbry.tv. If that meant that they are going closed-source, and we will no longer see code updates to the repository, that would suck. But since Odysee seems to have it’s own publically available brunch in the same repository, what is supposed to be the issue with that?
I haven’t worked with React.js before, and I thought there are some minor differences between how you deploy the desktop app vs the web app. If that’s the case, and if they are short on developers, I could see how the desktop app could end up neglected, no matter how trivial keeping it up to date would be. If it’s literally running the same build script with another parameter, that’s a bit embarassing, but addressable by the community.
Then I think you’re just wrong on that one. For a network-wide ban they’d have to retroactively delete the videos from the blockchain, which would mean a hard fork.
Ok, but that’s not network wide, that’s instance wide. The part of LBRY that is responsible for indexing, calculating hottest / trending content, and censoring is the wallet server. From everything you said it sounds like the channels are censored on official LBRY Inc wallet servers, but are otherwise still accessible over the P2P network.
What they mean by that is that anyone can start their own wallet server and decide for themselves which rules will be applied for hottest/trending calculation, and what kind of (if any) censorship there will be. Once you set that up you can literally point your desktop app at your own custom wallet server.
That said, getting the wallet server to sync up has been an absolute pain in the posterior for me, so I agree the “everyone has the same amount of control” claim is rather misleading at the moment.
Just having a bit of fun by being hyperbolic
There’s advantages to that approach for sure, but there’s also an advantage to them setting up a recognizable brand as an instance - people are actually moving over from Youtube. I do wish they’d do more to promote actual decentralization, the biggest item on my wishlist is to promote the use of private keys for authentication like DTube does, and I hope I can get enough people to nag them to actually implement that.
I did, that was a quite fun experiment! Funnily enough the report you picked is the most censored one. If you go to the lbry playground, and start entering the videos mentioned there, you’ll get an entry like:
{
"@sasergio005:3/A-Week-Away:6": {
error: {
censor: {
address: "bHkpV3HZBTcBNNqQ6ZgH3jZChBLwEa4Zty",
amount: "0.1",
canonical_url: "lbry://@LBRY-DMCA#d",
claim_id: "dd687b357950f6f271999971f43c785e8067c3a9",
...
name: "BLOCKED",
text: "Resolve of '@sasergio005:3/A-Week-Away:6' was censored by channel with claim id 'dd687b357950f6f271999971f43c785e8067c3a9'."
}
}
}
Claims from other reports, while not accessible from Odyssee will still give you a valid response from the wallet servers (which shows Netflix’s lawyers command quite a bit more respect). If you do get an uncensored response from a wallet server, you can just do a lbrynet get locally:
lbrynet get astream#ea41b9f807c6982cf97a1178838dfef64feaa014
And it will start downloading the video via the P2P network.
As for the videos that return a censored response from the wallet servers - yes, I am absolutely positive that they are not scrapped from the blockchain. Seeing the lenghts LBRY went to to comply with this particular DMCA, I’m not going to post specific Ids publicly, but If you have a synced up lbrycrd daemon running locally, you can just run the ./lbrycrd-cli getclaimsforname <claim_name>, and you’ll get the claimId, and transactionId of the video. You can then use ./lbrycrd-cli getrawtransaction <transaction_id> true to get the metadata. It took some code adjustments to the lbry-sdk, but I was able to get it to skip the wallet servers and send a request to my local lbrycrd instead, and as these videos are still hosted P2P, I was able to actually start a download!
I might write an article on how to do this step by step.
Hm, not sure what could be the cause. The only issue I had with it is that it makes my system a bit unresponsive (and funnily enough, I’m not sure why, because it has CPU, RAM, disk throughput, and basically every other resource I’ve looked at to spare…), but lbrycrd itself was always running reasonably fast.
Were you running the pre-built binary, or did you build it from the source yourself?
I also only have 16 GB. lbrycrd needs about 8GB, the other 8 are for the wallet server, but the blockchain node can run without it.
That is absolutely an issue that I think needs to be addressed, and something on my personal todo list. I think it should be possible to reuse some of the code to make a “dumb node” that just downloads the data from other peers, and exposes the same API for querying.
Yeah, some people just have a very black and white type of thinking, so I don’t blame you for interpretting it this way.
I wouldn’t call LBRY’s efforts “fake”, but rather “not optimal”.
The big difference is that lbry.tv has the ability to either enable or disable the viewing of mature content, Odysee has this disabled whether you like it or not.
Even if you enable it on LBRY (web or app), it’ll still be disabled on Odysee.
Given they’re promoting the Odysee website over any other instance (including apps), that’s going to be the flagship instance where everyone is on.
Sure, it’s easy to say “install the app then”, but unless you’re on Android or iOS, how many people do you think will have this idea of “let’s use the app of a video hosting platform that also has a web version that’s working equally fine and doesn’t automatically download videos to my local drive”?
I never said they’re going to make the source code closed source.
And I doubt that discontinuing lbry.tv is going to make them hide the source code.
I already explained the big concern above this quote, but I should also add that it takes away the sense of decentralization.
Some examples I can give of other decentralized platforms:
What they all have in common is, their websites show information about what their applications are about, how they work, and provide a small part of a list of instances you can join (or not), their statusses, their expertise, etc.
And they all might or might not have their own flagship instance, but in most cases they’d still urge you to join other instances.
Now compare it to LBRY:
The feel here is more like “join our flagship instance, download the app, or hang around with fellow developers”, no mentioning of being able to host your own instance, and probably you’d not even know unless you dig deeper into the documentation, or watch lengthy interviews with LBRY founder himself.
Wow be glad, not a fan of React.js at all.
It’s like a plate of spaghetti with HTML-like syntax mixed into Javascript code quite literally.
I’m personally in favor of developing using more traditional technologies so that I don’t need to make the app eat other people’s RAM for breakfast, but I guess it’s a personal preference.
There are options specific to the app and specific to Odysee, but they’re all explicitely defined within the source code.
One example I can give is this:
If you’re logged out and looking it from a web interface (aka, not the desktop app), show the sign up button.
Right below that you see an app specific part.
Considering there’s technically only 1 instance, you can call it “network-wide”.
But I think you have a good point here.
I’m not saying they’re not allowed to do so, of course they are.
But as mentioned above, the focus is on the flagship instance only, no mentioning whatsoever of any other instances’ existance (if at all).
I didn’t pick it deliberately, which is also why I said you can try out other reports.
My reason to pick this one is because it shows very well that censorship does exist.
There are other reports that will simply show that the video got taken down due to US copyright laws, but this one in particular shows the very same type of censorship you’d see on Gab or Parler; showing a “page not found” type of error as if the content never existed in the first place.
Fair enough.
Perhaps I’ll look into this a bit more over the weekend or something.
Looking forward for your article on this one.
