I am set to share videos I’ve downloaded but how do I see what is going on? ie: How many people are currently accessing my computer to watch videos? How much has my computer been used for this purpose? how much disk space am I losing to help out in this cause?
Is there a mechanism for me to set that I only want to allow a certain amount of my drive to be used for storing and sharing videos and have the system allow me to select which ones I’m currently sharing?
Is there a way to see if I’m even being seen by the lbry network? Is my connection live for example.
When I upload a video, the system takes a minute to “Uploading Video” but gives no indication as to where it is uploading or how this works. I’ve been searching for a week now and still don’t totally understand what is going on but it would see there IS a centralized server farm housing those videos, yet we don’t know where they are, how large they are or what outside service they are providing to the network.
What information is being stored in the blockchain itself? Do I have to download source and dig through it to see what the blockchain is made up of?
Where are comments and ratings and all of that information stored?
When a program like odysee.com accesses the network, how does it use pier to pier networking to build its list of videos I might want to watch so quickly?
To access the network I need to login, where is that information stored? If that server was shut down wouldn’t it shut down the entire network?
Lastly for now, where can I go to get answers? This forum seems totally dead at the moment which is surprising given all the excitement around lbry.
Hi! Sorry for the late response. I was away the last few weeksn, and as you’ve noticed the forum is not very active otherwise. I think I addressed some of your questions in other posts, and I’ll try to address the rest here tomorrow.
Sadly, no. I agree it would be a very good idea to have something like that though.
Sort of. You can look up the lbrynet logs (see here for where they are saved on your OS). You can look for entries like:
lbry.dht.node:152: joined dht, 53 peers known in 7 buckets
Any log entry coming from lbry.dht.* are coming from the content exchange p2p network operating on the same principles as BitTorrent. Log entries from lbry.wallet.* are about communicating with the blockchain (with the Wallet Server being an intermediary)
This depends on whether you’re doing it via Odysee, or the LBRY desktop app. The LBRY desktop app first uploads the content meta data to a Wallet Server (by default owned by LBRY inc, but a custom one can be set up, see here, and here. The content itself is then shared over the DHT network, though I’m not sure if there isn’t a direct upload to LBRY inc bootstrap nodes as well. I’ll look into it and write a post about my findings on my blog.
If you’re using Odysee, you first upload your content to the website, and it handles the interactions with the blockchain and the DHT.
There are centralized Content Delivery Network servers, but they’re used as fallback if no P2P nodes can be found.
The blockchain only stores metadata: channelnames, authors, publishers, content license, content hashes, etc. You can check the output of the get method from the sdk for a feel of what the stored data looks like.
There are centralized Comment Servers, which seem to store all data related to comments, likes/dislikes, followers, etc.
There are Wallet Servers running parallel to the blockchain nodes, they constantly query the blockchain and index all the data uploaded to it. This process is painfully slow, still wasn’t able to fully sync my local wallet server with the blockchain as running LBRY locally slows my computer to a crawl, renting a server powerful enough to do it is quite pricey. This is my personal gripe with LBRY and I’m trying to come up with a way to make it more efficient.
In any case, once that process is complete, and the wallet server is synced to the blockchain, querying it for newest / hot / etc videos is very fast.
You don’t need a login to access the network. If you set up the LBRY stack as described in my debugging wallet server blog post, you’ll be able to interact with the network without logging in. A private key is used for authentication instead of a login.
If you have an Odysee account they store a backup of your private key on their server.
Poking around by yourself, I’m afraid. You might have better luck at the discord server, but I haven’t really used it much myself.
I also have an issue with this, so I’m trying to figure out the answer to these questions myself, post about them on my blog, answer them as they come up on the forum, etc.
Thanks for the awesome help but you’ve brought up another great concern of mine that I have always worried about blockchains and no one seems to ever answer.
Right now lbry is nowhere close to that of youtube as far as content and yet the blockchain is already over 100gb in size. Blockchains sound great on the surface but I’ve always wondered how anyone would manage them if things got busy. Do you have an opinion on this? It seems like lbry coins are also mined but I don’t know what miners get for dealing with all of this data. Also, for those of us that would like to help out where we can, is there value in helping to maintain the blockchain for lbry?
I’m actually completely against relying on a blockchain for exactly the reasons you outline. I think the blockchain itself is currently “only” around 40-50 GB, but your point stands. On top of that, this is with only the metadata and transaction history being stored on the blockchain, the videos themselves will require orders of magnitude more storage, and I doubt anyone will sign up for hosting all of them, so I don’t see the point of maintaining an index of videos that no one hosts.
I’m still supporting LBRY because, sadly, the “social” component of “social network” is a lot more important than “network”, and they’ve done a very good job getting people to switch from Youtube. My plan is to set up a network that would run parallel to LBRY, which would help it out by hosting the videos over p2p, but would not rely on a blockchain for indexing.
The problem you have though is that most meta data for the videos are stored on the blockchain. So in reality you still need it. or you’ll need to provide some other mechanism for supporting it. I think it will also fall apart at some point due to it being based on sqllite. I did a video recently on the entire thing and hope I’m wrong in some of my points but at the moment I just don’t see evidence to support all of their claims.
I have a post with some musings about how I’d set it up without a blockchain (scroll down to the “taking it to the next level” / galaxy brain part). Sure, you’d need to store the metadata somehow, but let’s be honest, P2P nodes don’t need to store info on every single video every god forsaken soul has ever decided to upload ever.
I agree with you to a large extent, but I think the issues are solvable, and, again, I think abandoning LBRY for a not-yet-existing ideal platform would be a big mistake at this point.