As Editor of The BFD, I am always on the look out for alternatives on which to place our content because of the ongoing and increasing Big Tech censorship of conservative and right-wing voices. I am currently looking for a video hosting platform to load our videos to but I do not want to jump from the fireplace into the fire. There are a number of video hosting platforms out there but which one should I choose?
This month I wrote a couple of articles on alternatives to Big Tech including one on alternatives to Youtube which caught the attention of fellow New Zealander and CMO of Odysee and LBRY Julian Chandra.
As I had not included video platform Odysee or Libry.tv in my article I replied to Julian’s e-mail with ten questions to find out what Odysee has to offer both The BFD and other content providers looking for a new home.
1. How hard would it be to mirror The BFD YouTube channel on Odysee?
Not hard. During the sign up process, select ‘Sync my youtube channel’ and your existing and future videos will automatically be shared on Odysee.
2. What do you see as the main reasons why people should switch to Odysee/LBRY as opposed to other alternatives like Bitchute or Dailymotion for example?
It’s important to preface this answer by saying that Odysee isn’t really an alternative, it’s built on succeedent web technology (3.0). The LBRY protocol and by extension Odysee is not an alternative to a website, if we go by the definition of what products of this nature are.
But putting aside semantics, to answer in the nicest way possible, both platforms suffer from a lack of creator and content diversity. In the case of the former, not only is this exceedingly apparent as one sifts through an endless supply of right wing political content, but there are also many issues pertaining to their tech stack.
When you go through the latter, it works like a hyper curated digital magazine full of celebrity and corporatist content. Where are all the edgy animation and relatable personalities?
We’re finding that users are adopting Odysee at a rapid rate because Odysee is a generalist platform at its core. It’s not marketed toward any specific political dichotomy as is the play of a lot of these ‘alternatives’ and this helps us at the outset because we’re not polarizing people. So then when they hear about Odysee as this new platform built on decentralized tech and learn that there’s actually interesting content on there, not just political commentary as many have come to expect these other sites to mainly consist of, they rush to tell everyone — “we found something new here, and it’s actually good, take a look!”
3. While the protocol is decentralised, what is the risk of Big Tech coming to cancel Odysee servers or apps?
The risk certainly exists, but presently, there’s none or it’s very minimal. In our case, we’ve found many silicon valley engineers and industry players to be inquisitive and supportive of the technology.
It’s actually just a few Big Media outlets making a racket about things they don’t understand that we mainly have had to deal with so far.
4. How are you working to mitigate that since more and more “cancelled” personalities will come to you?
I don’t think these two things are connected. In the examples, we’ve seen of services being targeted and/or taken down, the justification for those measures were around user and/or group behaviour on those services. They were not targeted because they were for example hosting any one or multiple controversial creators.
5. Livestreaming is a big feature for many video hosting platforms, is that something Odysee/LBRY supports or is working on?
We’ve been testing our live streaming this past 1.5 weeks. We’re looking forward to opening up the service for select channels that meet certain criteria within a couple of weeks.
6. How big has the surge of new members and content been for you since the start of the year?
Growth is up 250% so far!
7. Do you use caching servers such as Cloudflare?
We do not use Cloudflare for content delivery.
8. If so do you cache in NZ?
We use a mix of service providers, including the decentralized LBRY network.
9. What upload capacity limits do you have?
Our web apps have an upload limit of 2GB.
10. Are you likely to get cancelled by your caching provider if the content is deemed socially unacceptable?
The behavior of big tech is what is socially unacceptable. We will cancel them.
If you would like to learn more about Odysee/ LBRY the above video answers the following questions:
- Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
- How and when did you originally get into cryptocurrency
- Can you give us a brief introduction to LBRY?
- With concerns around regulations coming to light, what is LBRY’s stance on KYC and privacy?
- With censorship ramping up on legacy platforms, do you expect more people to transition to LBRY? What are your daily active user numbers lately?
- With the CEO’s personal bank account and LBRY’s company account being targeted and shut down, how has that affected LBRY?
- What challenges is LBRY facing currently?
- Why did you leave TikTok and how is LBRY different?
- Let’s talk about Odysee. For people who are familiar with LBRY and LBRY.TV, what is the idea behind Odysee and what does LBRY want to achieve with it?
- Let’s dive into the spectrum of centralization and decentralization. Where does the LBRY app fall? Where does Odysee fall? Where does LBRY.Tv fall? What are some of the caveats of each?
- Will there be any type of ad sharing program we should expect to see soon?
- What are the next big updates for LBRY to release soon or that are in the works?
- Where does LBRY fit in with other existing similar projects?
- Where do you see LBRY going in the next year? The next 5 years?
- So where can everyone go to learn more about this?
Please share this BFD article so others can discover The BFD.