Wooo-boy here goes S reviewing another web3/crypto service!
You are absolutely right in the respect that we are reviewing a little site known as Odysee.com. A site that wants a piece of that sweet YouTube traffic out there but also has its own blockchain services powering it. We've been very critical about Web 3.0 services in the past such as PreSearch and now we really want Odysee to prove us wrong. After all, for those readers who come to my site, I've published article, after article, after article of YouTubes atrocities, and there came a point in our blogging career that frankly, we were sick of doing it because a blog is supposed to help you the reader. It's supposed to offer an alternative to the wrongs that exist on the internet.
Is Odysee that solution? Is it here to save us from tyranny and censorship? Is Odysee also going to release us from the borderline Stockholm syndrome caused by YouTubes' actions and decisions?
Short answer?
"Not entirely sure! Hopefully won't bankrupt out like some other video server startups. Or it won't get sued into oblivion." - S
Read on if you want to hear my diatribes!
Introductions.
We first heard of Odysee from one of our commentators and before you say it:
"yes, we actually -do- read the comments. At least the ones that don't set off the spambots with f-bombs everywhere" -S
We decided that we wanted to give it a try. After all, we criticized YouTube all of this time. It would be refreshing to offer a possible solution. So let us dive in.
With a lot of Web 3.0 technologies, there are often several players in the mix. So it's best that we introduce them all early on. So far I have no problems with how Odysee introduces itself. There's no sleight-of-hand marketing hype bullshit that we had when reviewing PreSearch which is a good sign.
The LBRY/LBC Blockchain.
What is this LBRY Blockchain that seems to follow every time you mention the Odysee video service? LBRY is the core of how it all works. A blockchain that people invest in to publish information in a near-free format (At least, that's the theory!). Now, if you go over to their website they will give you an application for your preferred system that allows you to browse the Web 3.0 blockchain for content. The purpose of this blockchain is that, unlike YouTube, Twitter, or practically any centralized service no one really owns the content and censorship is at a bare minimum in accordance with their TOS (Terms of Service)
Wait, how can one have a TOS and ban people off of a blockchain if the blockchain itself is resilient?
This is the catch. LBRY is a blockchain, but it's not decentralized. It's very much centralized by its creators and regardless if you use the app or you use odysee.com. It really does not matter. They control monetization, advertisement, censorship, and promotion. So to such ends. this actually puts them at the same level as YouTube. Not really any worse or better.
Enforcing TOS
Yes, if you upload porn. Or something the Odysee admin deems offensive. They can remove it off the blockchain. Or, at the very least append revisions to the point where your content is inaccessible. So to those people who believe Odysee is censorship free you might to rethink that sentiment because ultimate freedom means no holds barred Reaver/DarkWeb territory. LBRY blockchain is not open and owned by the community. Their blockchain is ultimately owned by Odysee. Hence, Odysee can modify the blockchain as they see fit instead of having an untrusted append-only state like what you see in other blockchains like bitcoin.
Types of publishing.
You can publish articles just like what we do here on this blog (we'll get to that feature later in this article). But mostly you can upload videos to the blockchain that get broken down into smaller chunks and stored within the blockchain for later download.
Staking LBRY.
Usually, it starts off costing about 0.01LBRY to publish content on their blockchain. Which is not very expensive. If you calculate it into real-world currency it's something like 0.0001(USD). But you can do one thing on their network that you normally can't do with any other video service. Popular in blockchain/web3.0 community; You can 'stake' crypto in your articles as an 'investment'. Effectively pouring money into a video and/or article to make it more popular on the blockchain than others of its kind.
By staking your videos you, therefore, create an ecosphere of the hyper-rich being the ones that you see first and foremost while the unknowns that publish their videos for the minimum of 0.01LBRY or less than 0.0022 cents (USD) get pushed to the back of the blockchain. Gee, wish we could say that we didn't see this coming in our Web 3.0 rant about information being bought and cataloged by the highest bidder. But here it is!
Alternatively, if you already have a massive social following then there's no need for you to stake any of your videos because they'll play just the same as someone you dropped thousands on their video.
LBRY.TV now Odysee.com
It was hard for people to really wrap their heads around the concept of what LBRY was trying to do. Not many people really downloaded the LBRY client and without accessibility, you are left with a microcosm of individuals that had limited coverage of their content. So, some of the developers helped start and eventually broke away from LBRY to set up a Centralized Web 2.0 service initially called LBRY.TV which later morphed into Odysee.com. Acting as a reflector service of the LBRY blockchain; Odysee made it very accessible for people who don't know/don't care about the blockchain and the web 3.0 application to actually make use of it as an alternative to youtube.
The rivals?!?
With most Web 3.0/Crypto ventures like Kickstarter commercials, they entice their audience by saying they want to break the chains of industry. To be disruptive towards the monopolistic ecosphere that the net currently had. Whether or not you believe that Odysee is the answer we have to acknowledge what exactly it is they are fighting.
YouTube
Starting from the humble beginnings of a bunch of programmers that wanted a site for videos to call home just as Newgrounds was a place for animation. YouTube is now practically a monopoly that pisses on those humble beginnings by selling out to big media. Homogenizing its user-made content base to the blandest unoffensive audience so that it turns a profit under its parent company Google while shuttling its funding out to a part of the world so they can tax-dodge. Stacking commercial after commercial upon the end-user in an effort to torture anyone who does not subscribe to YouTube+ or else be bombarded by more ads than most national US televisions can throw at you. There is no escaping this company! On websites, in chat rooms, you're bound to get a link to these people. A company that accuses everyone around them of wrongdoing but never apologizes for their own actions.
vimeo.com (they 404ed the linkage. Guess we're not cool enough!)
A service that is older than YouTube by a Year. Vimeo is a content service that takes a different approach to share videos. Catering to film production and documentaries that want to sell their works online. Although starting off as just a site to centralize CollegeHumor skits it was used by other professional designers in the computer graphics and motion picture field. This is not the kind of service that you put your Let plays on. Nor is this the service where you just jump on a microphone and podcast thousands of episodes. It is however a site that caters to artistic freedoms more so than even YouTube. To those that want to show off their animated shorts that are viewed by others within the industry. That it's okay to show nudity so long as there's an artistic reason behind it. Instead of porn just being for the sake of porn. Vimeo even provides a service that allows people to pay for their own space on the site to share their content. To which I've seen this comment appear over and over again.
LOL! Paying for a video sharing service! That's fucking stupid! - Anonymous
To this end; Allow me to explain this insanity:
- If you pay Vimeo money, They will work with you by stripping their logo off of everything within the video content you publish. This is actually very big for companies that want to produce training videos for thousands of employees and lack the bandwidth to house or broadcast these types of videos. You can keep them private and unless someone gets a direct link to that Vimeo video no one publicly will know. You make an internal website for your employees link to your private Vimeo account, and everything looks seamless. Removing public branding is something YouTube will never do no matter how much you pay them.
- Because you get unlimited bandwidth through Vimeo. This is actually a hell of a deal. Let's say you are someone like Rant Radio and want to publish all of the shows onto something that can be easily accessed by any user, say Roku, AppleTV application, or Android application. Instead of promoting YouTube. Or hosting on a local VPS so that several million devices can effectively DDOS'ing your server with the flood of requests while you pay surcharges for hundreds of terabytes in traffic. You let Vimeo handle it. Best bang for your buck.
This is how Vimeo makes money and this is why they are alive to this very day.
Parler
I could go on and on about other services like DailyMotion. But I wanted to address the political elephant in the internet room Parler. Yes, if you go to their site it's filled with a lot of Republican media. Why? Because YouTube has this knack for deleting a lot of what they have to say under the guise of misinformation. Or fake news. While some may think that is perfectly acceptable to be a part of the "Woke" activist crowd and assert Marxist tactics to shut an opponent down under the guise of being a YouTube Hero. Just remember that censorship is a slippery slope, eventually, the shows you may like on YouTube will fall into the crosshairs of the YouTube ban hammer for not being commercially viable or family-friendly. The further you bury opposing ideologies the more people will seek them out. This is what Parler is betting on. In part, this is also what Odysee is doing. The similarities between the two ends right there.
Although I don't have an account on this website I don't really have a problem with them. They're a centralized platform that wants to do its own thing. Cool.
The reason why I bring up Parler is you can sensationalize anything. For example, when typing and doing research on Odysee I slammed their name into the search engines to see what other bloggers have to say about Odysee and I got this as one of the titles.
Odysee: The new YouTube for the Far-Right - gnet-research.org
Wow, okay, I'm going to save everyone the effort and say that this blogger at gnet-research is click-bait thirsty on her headlines like a 90's Wired magazine editor (certainly got our attention and we want our 5 minutes refunded), About five paragraphs in she dismisses her own article title by saying it's not far-right at all which brings the question:
Why did you say it in the first place? - S
What we find a little sad about the political landscape of the internet is now. If you stand for a free speech there's a group of people that pull out this little white book of names. They don't know what these names represent. But they know they're bad and they're going to use them against you because they can't debate on any intellectual level otherwise. They will never apologize to you for using said names against you because apologizing is an admission that they could be wrong.
Free speech website? must be filled with Nazi's. - Anonymous
While we do not politically agree with many of the headlining content creators of Parler. The use of baseless terms has screwed with the reputation of other sites. And it's the real toxic internet! It looks like Odysee is not going to walk away from this shit show thanks to authors like that blogger at gnet-research.
Odysee, what does it do? How well does it do it?
Alright! Now that we've scared some of our reader base with politics and defined the arena of streaming video let's dive right into the meat of this topic before it hits the metal. Now just to make things fair we'll also be comparing the LBRY app at the same time.
If you liked YouTubes layout then at the time of posting you will certainly dig Odysees layout as the layout design feels mostly copied except the categories along the left-navigation bar are a little different. I did mark some favorite creators at the time of this posting which is why my home screen may look different than the LBRY home screen.
For those who downloaded the LBRY app, it feels a bit cleaner due to the lack of categories. Do we suppose this may be a little more intimidating to explore as looking beyond the headline videos how do you really know what's out there beyond slamming stuff into the search button? Despite this, it looks really good.
Oh hey look, a dislike button.
Remember when YouTube had a dislike button which meant that people had a voice determining if a video was absolute garbage or if it was great and it didn't have to hide behind the content moderator screen out of fear of mob action? Because if everyone likes something that's not mob action. But if everyone hates what you did. Say, YouTube Rewind, or the "new" Ghostbusters. Then that's mob action.
Great double-standards YouTube.
So, Kuddos to Odysee for keeping the dislike button.
Not so much on the LBRY app which has neither like nor dislike. It just plays video.
Sign-Up and Verification.
Registration on its own is actually fairly straightforward. You don't need to give them any personal information if you do not care about earning or accepting their crypto. But of course, we wanted to go further so onward to verification.
A few of the ways to verify is jumping onto Discord and giving your personal information in the form of an ID to some rando admin. Mmmm, after our interactions in the past with PreSearch administration we totally were not feeling that. Or you could give them a credit card to which my response is.
Oh hell no - S
Or finally, you can verify via phone number. Okay, fine, we have plenty of burner numbers so we've chosen that methodology for registration. Why so many burner phones? Story for another time!
With the LBRY app, there really is no verification standard. You don't really 'earn' LBC coin with the app and thus that requirement is sorta gone.
This sort of segways into the next step which is
Buying LBC coin.
Why would you? Well, let us list some of those reasons.
- You need it in order to upload videos. At least 0.01LBC
- You need it if you want to promote your video so it appears more and/or higher in the LBRY search engine. By 'staking' coins it promotes importance to your video. And apparently, you can remove said stake and cash out later if you choose.
- You can help promote other videos. If you see a video you like and want others to see while helping out that content creator you can give them LBRY going.
- Since Odysee has streaming capabilities just like YouTube. You can donate LBC coins just like trading twitches 'bits' back and forth.
- We heard this in the discord but apparently, if you stake more than 1,000 LBC to your account it unlocks the same privileges about letting their servers transcode video instead of you having to transcode them yourself. more on that later.
- Apparently, you can cash out your LBC and there-by make money on your channel. But it's not straightforward. More on that later.
We may be missing some other key points but you get the drift. In any blockchain-based network having their currency is kind of handy.
So! How do you get them?
The good news is if you are using the Odysee web service and/or you downloaded the Odysee app for android you can actually earn LBC just by using the platform. So there's no need to pull out your credit card and/or go to your local crypto broker in order to upload the video to this system. Once registered you can access your stats by clicking on your avatar and then clicking on rewards.
Legit buying LBC coin.
Next to your avatar icon in the upper right-hand corner if you still see the mount of LBC you have. If you click on that it takes you over to your balance where you can buy, receive and send LBC, as well as have a donation of your currency setup for your channel. Kind of neat. But okay! let's go buy some LBC!
Uhh, what the hell?!?
Now, if you click on the "Learn more" button it takes you off to a help page with instructions to buy LBRY using bitcoin using a crypto exchange service. To the average internet user that's throwing someone into the deep end of crypto markets. They're going to load up those pages see all of the graphs and go "NUPE!" alt+f4 the fuck out and go back to Twitch/YouTube.
But I know! I'll just use the LBRY app and buy coins that way!
Wow, I guess no one wants US Dollars anymore. That 'Moonpay' service they talk about? No LBC/LBRY coins to buy there.
Out of all of the web 3.0 applications on the net we've never encountered one that makes the difficulty factor of owning their crypto hard to buy into. We've seen plenty of startup cryptos where it's easy to buy in but hard to cash out. Not the other way around. With no information on either of their sites, we once again take it over to the Odysee Discord server. One of their admins responded with the fact that since Odysee is an American-based company they are currently being sued by the US government for starting a blockchain in the states and thus it creates a huge problem with the SEC (The United States Securities and Exchange Commission)
Why does Odysee or the LBRY app not post this on their site as to the reason trading within the United States is unavailable is beyond me.
LAWSUIT!
As LBRY is the first to set up a blockchain in the states of course the federal government stands up and wants a piece of that blockchain pie by filing a lawsuit against them. Claiming that a blockchain is a security that people invest in crypto in the hopes of their investment becoming bigger over time. That this is no different than purchasing shares of a company or buying company bonds to where you are loaning the company money in the hopes that they will pay you back.
Screenshot courtesy of coinmarketcap.
The government isn't necessarily wrong about this accusation! It's a thing you buy that does go up and down in value. That it is not like 'bittes' on Twitch which are static or DeviantArt points (Although the SEC could go after those groups as well as it's technically money in exchange for a token.) But alas, we are not lawyers. Just rando ass bloggers.
In the mind of the SEC, LBRY is breaking the law and the government does not have to make any special accommodations to the world of crypto in the unites states. We'll just post a link to the site the LBRY has set up detailing this a lot better. LBRY of course is fighting this because it's the first lawsuit of its kind and in the courts, the first case sets precedence for future cases.
The website the LBRY made is here: https://helplbrysavecrypto.com/
Now, you could sign a petition. Won't mean a whole lot to the SEC but sure. Why not. If you believe that what the government is doing is wrong you can get the word out some more.
From the perspective of just reviewing alternative video services than YouTube and Vimeo. Having a lawsuit hanging over your head is never a happy start!
Playing videos on Odysee!
Before we talk about recording a video. We must first go from the user experience of the watcher. The core reason why this website exists in the first place. In order for a video-sharing service to thrive, it must provide the end-user with a consistent experience when watching the video.
Odysee test video. Click here to view.
Now, I've uploaded something from my Google Pixel 5a phone which was a bunch of random-ass clips from Midwest Furfest 2021.
And although Odysee bitched a lot at how I encoded our video it does play not only on my PC but also on my android phone. It really wants you to dumb down your videos to 720p and to use an ancient encoding standard instead of something more open source like WebM. I set my FFmpeg to around 8Mbs and 1080p and it was fine. (you do pay a price for not following their standards as we'll explain below.)
Now, WHY was Odysee bitching about my video during upload? Because we set our FFMPEG to a high bitrate as there's a lot of moving and flashing going on throughout the video. To those interested in the FFmpeg command we commonly use while uploading to Odysee, here it is:
ffmpeg -i "MASTER.mp4" -c:v libx264 -profile:v high -preset veryslow -b:v 6000k -minrate 2000k -maxrate 8000k -bufsize 12000k -an -pass 1 -threads 0 -y -movflags +faststart -f mp4 NUL ffmpeg -i "MASTER.mp4" -c:v libx264 -profile:v high -preset veryslow -b:v 6000k -minrate 2000k -maxrate 8000k -bufsize 12000k -c:a aac -b:a 128k -pass 2 -y -movflags +faststart -f mp4 "Odysee-Upload.mp4"
Right, In general, we kept the bitrate around 6Mb/sec as this leaves plenty of room for spikes in movement as well as audio tracks.
This isn't the kind of video that we post on our blog which is just tutorial screenshots with minimal animation. There's a lot happening. To add insult to injury Odysee will only accept a video if it's H.264/MP4. Thus, the usage of modern codecs like what we do on this site is a no-go as well.
Odysee also does not let the person who records the video submit smaller versions like a 480p/720p variant for people who are on mobile devices or in low bandwidth areas.
Thus, if you actually go to the video we submitted onto Odysee and you're on the internet that is anything less than 8Mbs download and/or going through an Onion node. Be prepared for buffering. Or, it may not even load at all.
Quality issues are galore!
Now, as mentioned in purchasing LBC, if you stake 1000 LBC to your channel OR you purchase Odysee Premium you cat have Odysee's servers transcode the videos for you. Since we did not do this we're going to pick one of the favorites that we follow on Odysee which is "SomeOrdinaryGamer" Aka "Muta" a long time ago they did a review of our site on the dark web.
We're going to pull his video of "Doom Can Finally Destroy Your Graphics Card..."
We meet again Muta.
Okay, so one of the reasons why major content creators are using services such as Odysee is at any time. YouTube can fuck all and delete your channel. Their server, their rules, they can take their ball and go home (Odysee has similar rules, but nowhere near as intense as YouTube). And it's apparent that Odysee is rendering his videos as you can step up and down in resolution, unlike the video that we uploaded. But notice the resolution. Huh, did muta only upload his YouTube at 810p?
Hell no! He's uploading 1440p on YouTube! So, from a video-watching POV Odysee is providing an inconsistent standard by offloading the transcoding CPU cycles to end-users that don't pay the 1k in LBC. Those who do actually pay or use the YouTube sync tool are getting a diminished version of their mirror from YouTube.
In effect, by me uploading at 1080p to Odyee I end up with better video resolution than a professional that uses the sync tool at the cost of losing views from low-bandwidth watchers.
High speed FPS? Get cubed bro!
FPS games are notorious for being high-speed videos that do not compress very well!
You can click on the image for full detail. But this certainly is a "What the hell?!?" moment right here. At first, I thought my poor GTX1660 was dying. I even switched from firefox to chrome. Nope! Same effect. This pixelation effect tends to happen more so with streamers and publishers that sync versus those that encode the videos themselves. Also, note that if their channel is slow-moving such as news reporters sitting at a desk then the block effect is almost non-existent.
This effect also happens to the android client of Odysee as well. So, it's certainly not my computer!
I load the same video using the LBRY app to access the blockchain directly and the video plays with no problem. So, it's not an issue with the blockchain as much as it is an issue with the reflector services that Odysee is running.
Consistency of the UI and the content needs to be the front priority of video service or else a user will walk away feeling as if the service was half-completed.
The Web 3.0 toll booth is out there.
When we published our opinions about Web 3.0 several months back we got some heat from people about the overall dystopian tone of the internet eventually turning into a giant toll booth where you have to pay in order to get access to the information. Even we thought that perhaps we were being a little too cynical about the whole situation.
But here comes Odysee to prove us right. Where people can set prices on watching their content without as much as even getting a preview behind what it is they are selling like what you would normally get out of Vimeo. Sure, it's only 1LBC which is 0.22 cents. Everything starts small at first until there's a price tag on everything that you click on. Communication breaks down when money is involved like in the example above. I have no idea what it is. There's no preview or even description.
Although it's rare to come across a video like this on the Odysee service. Do we believe that people who make films be paid for their works? Of course, we do. but a little structure goes a long way versus just mixing them in with the rest of the search and saying "Welcome to Odysee. Pay now!"
The Ads on Odysee.
Advertisement is a lot like getting paid to have their dog shit in your house. Ideally, it would be best if the dog took a shit in the bathroom because it would be easier to ignore/cleanup versus that dog shitting in your main living room. Odysee (for now) takes the stance of having the Dog shit in the side navigation bar of the website which is easier to tolerate versus YouTube and Twitch which bombard you with more advertisement than the actual content.
When running something as expensive as a video sharing service. We understand that thirst for money. If the money does not come in then the bills don't get paid and you end up like previous providers in the past. At the same time. A service provider has to determine if the ads they are running are offending people so much that they end up leaving your service altogether. In other words, your house has way too much shit in it and no one wants to come over.
Odysee does a rather good job of balancing that out. We guess as a side effect of our analogy on the world of advertisement. Donald Draper will not be friends with us and we won't be getting sponsors from a marking firm anytime soon.
Blogging on Odysee?!?!
This is probably one of Odysee's lesser known features which is you don't need to upload a video at all! Instead, you can use Odysee like WordPress and simply type out a bunch of text and call it a post! Even attach a picture so that the video thumbnail has 'something' to look at.
So in a bizarre twist Odysee wants to take on Medium as well as YouTube. Interesting. Why not just put in a WaveSkin player like we did in our microphone sound section and take on SoundCloud while you're at it guys?
We personally don't have a problem with Odysee exploring other mediums beyond just video. Growth beyond video is good. But much like a lot of things on the Odysee platform. A little bit of organization can go a long way!
We're bloggers. We're legit interested in the stories of others in text form. How can we filter those stories from the videos? Currently, we can't see a means of doing so. Thus, unless you throw a lot of LBC at something like this guy did in the picture above. It sorta gets lost in the blockchain.
Odysee visibility on the rest of the web.
We did an article a while back about our blog's searchability and although we had minimal success in making much of an impact on the search engines at least we did an effort in getting the word out there that a self-hosted website supports its own videos. When looking up Odysee you can tell from search engine to search engine that Odysee is dead to the world. This is a stark contrast from looking up other video providers such as "peertube" which is a decentralized video sharing CMS that after a while you WILL get to a peertube instance.
Is it the search engines' faults or is it Odysee? Well, a long time ago we were lectured about not having a sitemap-video.xml file which we have now. Did it help the indexability of our site? Slowly it did yes. Does Odysee.com have a sitemap-video.xml file for search engines to index?
And their robots.txt just has:
User-agent: * Allow: /
As basic as it gets kids.
So the administration of Odysee isn't really doing themselves any favors by not giving searchable information to the engines out there. Perhaps once they get their house in order they can talk to other blockchain services like PreSearch to have a priority of their content with them instead of everything facing back to YouTube all of the time. Search engine dominance does matter for a public video-sharing service to survive.
The Odysee community.
If there is one thing that we do find extremely refreshing is the Odysee community on Discord. Now, we've seen a lot of startup crypto companies where their community is only concerned about pumping and dumping crypto before the rug-pull while still claiming to have those diamond HODL hands (we threw up a little in our mouths having to type that much crypto-lingo). But that did not happen here.
Instead, people were genuinely interested in the product the crypto was backing instead of the shit we dealt with on PreSearches telegram. There was a feature request which allowed users to submit their ideas to the Odysee dev team. And to top it off the administration was very knowledgeable and gave us more information than what the odysee.com website could've given us. (which is almost a problem in itself! But kudos for answering those questions.)
At the time of this posting. Odysee's discord is a model of what a crypto-backed organization should be. Not so much about the money but about the technology the money is backing.
Where is YOUR Odysee account?
If the link disappears for reasons. We'll update this section of the blog. If you follow me leave in the comments below of your channel and will follow back.
Anyone who makes a blog article about tech and never shows you using their services is a group of hypocrites.
Privacy and self.
Will we be shutting down our website and moving over to Odysee? No. Because we still believe you should control your data. Our FAQ goes into insane detail about that. You should get a VPS and start your own website. If anything else let your audience know about where your video production mirrors are and inform people of all of the videos YouTube has taken down on you. Never give a service the ability to silence you.
Odysee is what the IT world calls a 'layer 2' service. Meaning that there is a centralized point of access to get to the videos. By the design of the developers; It's supposed to be an example of how to use the LBRY publishing blockchain for application use. From a creative standpoint, it does nothing to really solve the problems YouTube has. It still has a TOS, there's still analytics involved, and the content is curated by its team and monetized via its ad sponsors.
If you remember Google's promise of "Don't be evil" and breaking it when the policy becomes inconvenient or gets sold off to someone else? The same can happen with Odysee. Yes, once it's on the LBRY blockchain it cannot be deleted but if a service severs that connection to the blockchain then what really is the point? We could in turn use that pointlessness of blockchains being forever for other services like "Forever Domains" and NFTs.
In other words. They can kick you off of Odysee just like YouTube can. Their server, their ball. They can take it away from you and go home. The right to refuse business in America is a beautiful thing because you don't need justification.
To this end, this is why we stand behind making our own server. And hosting our own content. We talked a lot about how we got to this point here, as well as here. Effectively, if you want a truly free speech video platform. Then YOU must control the data. Fuck YouTube, Parler, Odysee, Vimeo, DailyMotion. Yes, fuck all of those people without lube! You can post videos into a CMS like I do (WordPress is not the greatest about videos but we made it work) or PeerTube. There are a plethora of CMS engines to choose from really! Or if you're the hardcore type you can bust out your notepad and learn how to throw the video links into a flat HTML site. Go nuts! But you may need to throw some money down and do your research with the web provider you are about to go with.
Final thoughts.
Odysee is a video-sharing service that feels like it needs more polish. From their impending lawsuit hells blocking the trade of all their tokens. To be forced to pay for a premium subscription or learn a lot of FFmpeg recipes. Or, use an application such as handbrake as we did in order to minimize bandwidth to upload a video. It's a fairly steep learning curve for the average film guy who just wants to take their go-pro and dump it out to the internet!
Now, out of all of the Web 3.0 blockchain services right now and the possible nightmares incurred when running through some of their features. This is by far the best one out of all of them. It serves a purpose. It wants to host video and it's doing it! Perhaps that is the beauty behind this service that the crypto functionality is just background noise. Odysee takes the web 3.0 app mostly out of the equation!
Will Odysee be successful? I guess it really comes down to a few factors.
- Will Odysee/LBRY survive their lawsuit? - Well! The American government like most can be a group of real dicks.
- Will YouTube continue to be oppressive puritan dicks? - Probably.
- Will Odysee react quickly to fix the video-watching experience throughout their site? - Still in beta so this is a 'wait and see' thing.
- Will Odysee repair relations with search engines (There are more than just Google boys, girls, and all of the robots fighting interdimensional battles) so they can at least attempt to be visible to the rest of the internet?
Clearly, there are people who have abandoned YouTube altogether and have now dedicated all resources of their channel to Odysee. It is of course good to see this level of middle-finger rebellion towards the normalities. The momentum simply needs to keep moving forward!
Other points about the subject of Crypto-powered services.
Whenever a company mentions crypto/blockchain services to revolutionize an industry or to take down a monopolistic empire. Read their TOS. Seriously, read every page of their TOS to ensure that you as a creator are not supporting a company that wants to be even more tyrannical than what is already out there. Because blockchain technology has attracted a lot of bad actors within the realms of the internet and finance. Thankfully Odysee's TOS is not terribly out of line.
Unless your a pornstar, you're still stuck with PornHub for the big guys and Peertube for the homegrown action.
Retrospect.
We will probably use Odysee to store videos that have no real topic of bearing on this site directly so in the event the hammer is dropped. Well, Nothing of real value is lost. Besides, we tend to back up all of our data anyways.
We still stand behind what we said to Odysee on Twitter. We have seen a lot of video services come and go. This site has currently outlived them all. The question comes right down to this.
Can you outlive us Odysee? - S
We're a little blogging service that survives on a few hundred US dollars per year. You guys are pouring millions into a lawsuit where we question if it would be cheaper to just register as a security with the SEC? Ultimately, it's time that's going to tell!
Until next time. May server protect you.
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