>Did LBRY somehow convince people to sign up and cross-post their videos
Yes they did. When you create a channel they give you the option to do this.
Thanks for the awesome feedback, gave me a huge smile!
If you share your channel or wallet address, will send a tip over!
I'm still amazed that it's a fully working clone of youtube. Is there any info anywhere about... who made it? How long did it take? What's the tech stack like? What were the hardest parts?
As a totally minor point, I originally started with the MacOS app, and it had a poor experience due to my own fault: my harddrive was almost full, so videos kept freezing in the first few seconds. I almost unfairly blamed you, but perhaps a warning might be good if there's no space for the temporary video buffer. (I assume it's streaming to disk.)
But, in terms of bugfixes or feature requests, that one probably shouldn't be prioritized. ~Nobody is out of harddrive space. Just grasping for straws at things to mention in case it's helpful.
Rooting for you. Good luck. I'll try transferring over my videos, and I'll consider linking to LBRY (or is it odysee?) by default for my videos. It's a risk -- if your platform goes down, all my backlinks will go with it -- but I like the david vs goliath aspect.
That's actually a tough decision. Pretty much everybody in the world expects a youtube link for a video, and has integrations for it. I wonder what the embedding situation is like for this... I'll try it out.
By the way, the odysee front page is far better than any other youtube competitor so far. https://odysee.com/$/tech is particularly interesting. Keep up the quality, and this might have a shot.
The blockchain is C++ (bitcoin fork)
The SDK is python
The apps are JS (desktop/lbry.tv/odysee.com), and java/swift for mobile apps.
The disk space issue is definitely something that has been talked about for a while. https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-sdk/issues/1311. As the lead maintainer of https://github.com/lbryio/lbry-desktop, it's the last issue I'm waiting on before the 1.0 release!
Still, they have a big hurdle. It all comes down to whether it'll be adopted.
First impressions of the MacOS app: Loading time was long, but onboarding was effortless. Threw me right into the app.
Immense disappointment when I realized it was for video, not books.
Gave a video a try, "A better way to split firewood."
Since there's no URL bar, there doesn't seem to be any obvious way to link someone to a video.
But! There's a web version: https://odysee.com/@SicCooper:1/3d-all-stars-super-mario-64-...
Seems like... youtube. Hmmm.
First impressions are ... surprisingly positive. This is somehow an almost-complete, fully working clone of Youtube. There are missing features, but I can look past that.
The recommendation engine is obviously the biggest weakness, since there's probably not much content to recommend. But I found myself watching https://odysee.com/@atthespeedoflife:b/it-may-not-be-adhd-pa...
Pleasantly surprised to find a 2x speed setting. The production quality of the video is good too. No problems whatsoever.
This got me curious: How hard would it be to set up my own channel? So I clicked sign in, and was delighted to discover they have a "sync my youtube" checkbox.
... Unfortunately, after creating my account, there's no sign of where the "Sync my youtube" feature went to. I checked the box, but there wasn't any prompt or further info. Well, back to watching.
The production quality on these videos is actually incredible. This one has 6 views: https://odysee.com/@AlphaPhoenix:f/why-are-metals-so-stretch...
"Why are metals so stretchy?"
I got a bit suspicious, so I checked youtube. Yep, it's on there too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn1Y6zIS91g&ab_channel=Alpha...
They have 14k subscribers, which isn't huge, but is significantly greater than "nothing." Did LBRY somehow convince people to sign up and cross-post their videos, or are they simply hosting random videos? Now I'm curious where it's hosted.
This is interesting enough to give a fair shot. I'll be watching it closely.
Their FAQ is a solid resource: https://lbry.com/faq
I'm mostly curious how they pulled off a fully-working clone of YouTube. That's an incredible achievement, setting aside all the questions it raises.
I see that Google banned them, which honestly makes me want to support LBRY more. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24594663