[kauffj]

LBRY is the best YouTube alternative because it is the only one that fundamentally changes social video in a way that YouTube cannot copy.

LBRY uses a public blockchain to allow creators to retain complete control over their publishing identity. It also has a beautiful consumer app experience at https://lbry.tv, which was used by about 4M people last month (P2P apps at lbry.com/get).

You can read more in our IEEE paper here: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9126007

Or dig into the specification and APIs at https://lbry.tech

[ravenstine]

Is a blockchain really necessary? Why not simply use an RSA key pair?

[kauffj]

A blockchain retains a complete, coherent, censorship-resistant listing of what's available on a network in a way that local or federated key-pairs can not.

There is no search all of PeerTube. There is search all of LBRY.

[danShumway]

But what's available on the network isn't permanent.

How do you handle when a video stops getting hosted? Does it just keep showing up in search results, and then give an error whenever anyone tries to view it?

And if that's not the case -- if an unhosted, missing video can be removed from the blockchain by adding a revoke transaction or something, then how is it censorship resistant? If entries can be removed from search results when they go missing, haven't you just created a shared database where objectionable content can be removed from search for everyone at once?

That seems strictly worse than Peertube. At least on Peertube if you want to remove a video you'll need to target all of the instances that are mirroring it; you can't just attack one ledger that everyone is forced to use.

[jsigwart]

The blockchain provides a searchable index of content.

[ravenstine]

You can have a searchable index of content without blockchain. The web has searchable content indexes without blockchains for almost my entire lifetime. What does a blockchain actually solve here? Without a blockchain, at a bare minimum, all you would need is for creators to post signed content to an index, and anyone can verify the content with the creator's public key. Whether a piece of published content has a hash that precedes the previous one seems irrelevant.

[hirundo]

> What does a blockchain actually solve here?

Immutability. Once a link gets on the blockchain you can depend on it not changing. The content it points to can go away, but with an immutable index, that is discoverable. Censorship and link rot are more evident.

[lokedhs]

So if someone uploads a 2 hour version of a rickroll and tags it with the name of the latest blockbuster movie and then takes it offline, there is now going to be a permanent record that at some time there was a copy of this movie uploaded? When in fact that never happened?

How is this in any way better, or even something beneficial?

[hirundo]

Tamper evidence. The blockchain link would include a hash of the contents, making it impractical to modify rather than disappear content.

[kgraves]

How do video/audio creators content protected from people stealing their videos? Is there a ContentID like system?

Can creators make money on this platform like YouTube?

[ehsankia]

The latter is the key point. Considering all the controversy there is on Youtube about individual videos getting demonetized, I don't see why creators would move to platform that doesn't even pay to start with, or even worse you have to pay to use (Vimeo).

Those platform definitely have a purpose, but replacing Youtube is not one of them. They're fine for putting fun video to share with friends and family, but if you want to be a content creator and make a living from it, there isn't an alternative. If you already have a huge following and make most of your money from Patreon, maybe you can move, although you'd lose a lot of viewers.

[skinnyasianboi]

I also don't get why LBRY is so underrated on hacker news. It is the best content platform especially in terms of free speech and monetization. Every update very few weeks makes the platform even better and more convenient.

[donor20]

Nice - if people steal videos how is that handled on the platform? Similarly for copyright infringement such as uploading full length commercial movies. Porn?

[type0]

Also it should be easy to cross-post to LBRY from youtube

[seanyesmunt]

It is easy. https://lbry.com/youtube