this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Eh... what the hell is that link? The recommended videos on that place are WILD.
I had heard some rumblings about Rossmann being on some weird alt-right focused service, but I had honestly forgotten and I wasn't expecting to get a faceful of it by accident. Yikes.
It's odysee, a frontend to lbry, a sort-of decentralized alternative to Youtube. Which seems very enticing, because an alternative to Youtube is badly needed.
Unfortunately, at the moment it is completely overrun by religious nutjobs, Nazis and other assorted scum. It is not by its nature an alt-right service, but it does attract all those who would be banned anywhere else.
It is whoever uses it the most. If it gets overrun by alt right people it is an alt right service.
Cue in the obligatory "This is a Nazi bar now" reference: https://x.com/Iron_Spike/status/1646817528482770944?s=20
Unfortunately alt-right crypto weirdos have coopted the term "decentralised", and so it is with this site. It's a crypto-based... video... hosting... platform? I cannot for the life of me figure out how it works other than that it mines crypto in the background while you have the site open and if you have an account, you get a cut of the crypto you mined.
I have tried looking into it, but they don't explain anywhere in their promo materials, it's literally just "earn while you watch!", which... yeah no thanks. I've been on the internet and paying attention for more than 5 minutes, I know that grift when I see it.
"Decentralised" isn't enough, you need a way to ban people that is also decentralised, and that's where federation comes in.
I don't know if they're eventually going to coopt "federation". I wonder if that's the ultimate test of a social technology - if it can be coopted by reactionaries. The less able they are to do so, the better it is.
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.
That really doesn't explain how it works. So... the host mines crypto as well as sending you videos? What is the economy supposed to work like? What does the blockchain actually achieve here? Why do people host in that case? Where do they explain this?
Anyway, I'm still not interested in crypto anything. The moment I saw it was blockchain based I noped out pretty fast. I'm guessing a lot of people do and that's part of why it's such a reactionary cesspit.
Like we don't need blockchain for this; regular federation already works.
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.
Peertube is also p2p, so the videos can be hosted apart from the host instance, and there's nothing stopping peertube instances from maintaining a distributed ledger of references to videos without the blockchain.
Everything you say blockchain does can be achieved via distributed plaintext ledgers. It is solving a problem that doesn't exist.
As for the earning money part, eventually you do have to connect your personal details in order to transfer crypto to a usable currency, so that problem isn't really solved either.
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.
Immutability is irrelevant if the point is to maintain a record of posts to prevent censorship. The only thing that matters is that some instances keep the record. Bad actors could try to lie about the posts, but that doesn't delete the ledger from other instances.
And no, no single instance is responsible, that's what it means to have a distributed ledger. Distributed ledgers are already a proven technology that is extremely robust against censorship. You may have heard of them, they're called bittorrents.
In fact, federation is also a kind of distributed ledger since once content federates a record is kept by any instance it is distributed to. It's a solved problem and not even that hard. Synchronisation consists of, "here's my latest posts, keep a record of them please". This is such a basic concept and I don't know why you called it a "single point of failure". It is exactly the opposite of a single point of failure.
Privacy is not guaranteed even with Monero, and you're still getting paid in crypto which is inherently unstable because the only thing it is worth is what you can sell it for, so it goes through boom-bust cycles constantly, and the immutability - when forks aren't happening - only serves to enable scams. To defeat that crypto people have created banks, defeating the point of a zero-trust system.
There's no public trust in it and it takes enormous carbon footprints to run, so it's unsustainable on so many levels. I don't want to support crypto on any level on principle, so no, I don't want LBRY tokens. A lot of people feel the same way, and looking at the population of Odysee, a large number of the people who are on board are a bunch of right wing assholes.
Hard no.
odysee is a weird place, lots of "creators" that were forced off youtube and other places for far out views or outright dangerous lies ended up there as they have almost no rules.
There are a lot of non-far-right weirdos that use it, but it is hard to scroll through without seeing some fringe crazy shit.
Jesus Christ, you weren't kidding. One of the recommended videos for me was "Why the crusades were completely justified!" Yeah, fuck that crazy shit.
https://i.imgur.com/nOOT8NK.png
what the fuck is this?! WHat IS THIS?!
What the actual fuck
Look at this fucking shit.
Fucking hell. Why did they steal the thumbnail format from those kids channels.
It is not an alt-right service. It doesn't show recommendations based on data collected about you, and instead shows subscriptions, and top viewed videos with similar titles to the video you're watching.
Both videos containing the word "justified" is probably the reason. Odysee is in my opinion what YouTube should have been.
Every other recommend video had the word "justified" in it. It's recommending similar videos on the titles alone. I'm not defending it, just pointing out how weird that is.
"Why posting weird videos is justified"
What's really wild is that people arguing for things like Right-to-Repair would be anywhere near right-wing to begin with.
Like, Louis, you don't see how the entire conservative ideology undermines ideas like right-to-repair? How can you be like "Yeah, I trust these guys who all would shut down the things I'm arguing for," and just be oblivious to it?
Louis's videos are posted to multiple platforms out of principle, not politics... that means they also get posted on sites with creators that have been kicked out of YouTube, like the one linked here
A person of principle wouldn’t post there. Simple. It walks, quacks and shits like a duck.
My principle is I don't hang out in fucking Nazi spaces.
Like, I wouldn't go to a bar that advertised itself as a Nazi bar, and I wouldn't upload my content to a site like this, that has enough Nazis on it that they're in the recommended videos for a fucking Louis Rossman video.
If Louis is happy hanging out at Nazi bars, that's on him and you can hardly hang that on "principles."
Odysee is not a Nazi space. It is a privacy focused decentralized alternative to YouTube.
The largest group of youtubers on that platform are not the alt-right, but rather, the free and open source software community, privacy and decentralization advocates, and programmers.
And yet the top suggested videos were about how the Crusades were justified and how cop shootings are justified.
I would think if the largest community was programmers, those kind of videos would be suggested, not this shit.
Top suggested videos sadly speaks otherwise about the people on this site.
Because both videos have the word justified in them
Still a shit site that we’ll never hit main stream.
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)
Repairing things used to be normal. From that point of view, conservatism is perfectly right.
I doubt he is right wing, given what he says and does.
Conservatism has only ever existed to keep an aristocracy. Look at history, it's literally why it developed as an ideology, because a lot of the aristocracy from Europe didn't actually want the aristocracy to end, so they needed to make up political positions that supported the idea that there should be an untouchable elite to whom laws don't apply.
It has literally never, ever existed to "conserve" anything like natural resources or the rights of individuals. At it's core it was about retaining Kings, Queens, Dukes, and Lords without actually keeping those, but instead making it about wealth.
So yeah, gonna hard disagree on that. Conservatism is the source making laws that deny you the ability to repair, the conservatives aren't the ones out here fighting for it.
People get old, they do not want this to change. That is where it comes from. Regardless of the persons status. It is also irrelevant where it comes from.
I think I just realised that the term "conservative" is just a lie. Just like "pro-life" or whatever other BS they come up with, it's just a smokescreen to cover their real agenda, which is to dominate others.
Dude sounds a lot like a libertarian business owner tbh. I wouldn't be surprised if they align very well with the right otherwise.
he has some very dubious takes - he's very correct on how shitty it is to be a consumer but he's completely blind to any systemic analysis of it, willfully I would imagine.
Platforms that offer greater freedom also tend to host visibly more extreme content. My guess is the slightly more advertiser friendly extremism pushed by algorithms on mainstream platforms is far more impactful on society.
Outside of the relatively small number of people engaged with issues like software freedom, privacy, right to repair there is no reason to choose a platform with less views unless your content is banned from the alternatives.
I expect Rossmann's politics are shaped by his experiences as a small business owner. Many such people desire greater economic and individual freedom and are likely economic liberals but that doesn't necessarily influence their views on other matters. He is an outspoken advocate for consumer freedoms including right to repair which I respect. I don't know the guy personally but I would be surprised and disappointed if he endorses far right crazy shit. I am using Lemmy and respect the people who wrote the software but nothing about my politics should be inferred from theirs.
Here's the conservative angle, at least in my view: "We've always had the right to repair our possessions before, and we will conserve that right for future generations."
Then again, what I consider conservative has never actually matched up with the political party, which is a big part of why I am no longer right wing.