I love shitting. Y’all are afraid of a simple four letter word. Sure, it is weird, but to each their own! It is not like real toilets are harmed. There are no studies that shitting is harmful, rather it takes away the urge before it does any real harm!
It is that time of the year again, when swedes complain about another scene being censored from Donald Duck’s Christmas, as their dads go out to buy the newspaper and/or snus.
I have two mastodon accounts that I barely use. I realized that I just don’t like twitter style social media in general. Same with pixelfed. I didn’t have accounts on the centralized alternatives to begin with. And I think that is fine. Centralized or not, social media that focuses on displaying your personal image is a scourge on humanity.
Lemmy completely replaced Reddit for me because overall the userbase on Lemmy is friendlier, and the quality of the content is better here. I reckon that once the normies flood, so will the toxic people.
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.
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.
It doesn’t really need to hit mainstream IMO. It is a good alternative for privacy and decentralization enthusiasts. With an account you’ll mostly be getting videos from channels you subscribe to. It is honestly the first time I found an alt-right video on that platform.
You have the same garbage on YouTube but their algorithm hides it from you and shows it to the alt-right. Odysee doesn’t have an algorithm.
You can’t really have an algorithm and privacy at the same time, so the best you can do here is downvote and block the video/channel.
With enough downvotes (only around 2 more should be enough ) the video won’t be recommended as much.
You can see it has one green blob thingy. That’s my downvote. It isn’t a huge platform to begin with so it is not like it takes much to drive out the trash.
If it violates site policies or law, you can report the video and have it taken down, though it will only be taken down from Odysee, and not on other instances that use the underlying video hosting technology (LBRY)
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.