Odysee, a decentralised YouTube alternative focused on free speech, is officially ending the serving of ads on the platform, starting today. The post:
"Dear friends of Odysee, Starting today, we’re removing all ads. We don’t need ads to make money as a platform and we are confident in the development of our own new monetisation programs that will help creators earn a living and at the same time keep Odysee alive. Ultimately, sacrificing the overall user experience to make a few bucks isn’t worth it to us and nor is it even sustainable for a platform that wishes to make something truly open and creatively free.
As we take this decision, one thing is certain to us, media platforms (even ones that market themselves as ‘free-speech’) typically devolve into advertising companies and end up becoming beholden to their paymasters. It’s been that way for centuries and is never going to change.
As we see YouTube become more aggressive with their ad deployment and ‘Free Speech’ platforms try to build their own ad businesses it’s apparent to us that we’re building a model for Odysee that will keep it sustainable not only financially, but in its ability to provide an incorruptible user experience.
Our approach may be considered niche or unconventional, that’s fine by us. Odysee will be used by the world on terms that are agreeable to its users, and we know our users don’t like ads.
Best, Founder & Creator, Chief Executive Officer. Julian Chandra"
Sure looks full of MAGA garbage. Conceptually it’s a good idea, but I’ll be passing since I don’t need that trash in my life.
I completely understand not wanting to see that there, and you don’t have to see it, and besides, I see that all over YouTube too when I’m not signed in receiving good recommendations based on what I like.
I suggest reading my comment response to YTG123 (which is the other person who just replied to you), since you probably weren’t notified of it. Sorry to not reply directly, but I understandably don’t want to write another few hundred words, and the comment is relevant to you.
Thank you for this reasonable response.
Perhaps when things mature, I’ll give it another look. YouTube for me, when not signed in, does not have the sheer plethora of MAGA nonsense like this site does. Maybe it’s some regional algorithm, I don’t know, though I live in the south where MAGA idiocy runs rampant.
I take the path of least resistance when it comes to filtering out lies and garbage from my life. For now it’s simpler for me to just not browse the site than to weed out such content.
It definitely is, but it doesn’t try to force recommendations on you like YouTube. You can mostly just subscribe to channels you like and view their content.
It doesn’t force recommendations on you, and channels you don’t like can be muted or blocked. I’ve only blocked a handful of channels (Most of them were synced from YT too). Than there are sections: if you only want to see content you like to see, use the respective sections. If you want to see technology content, you aren’t going to click on the spirituality section.
Furthermore, recommendations aren’t actually a free feature (yet), as it’s still in early access and comes with Premium. 99.99% of the people who are upset about the “recommended content” being stuff they strongly dislike aren’t actually even being recommended anything to begin with. The videos that appear on the side are “Related” videos. Their system for determining related videos isn’t extremely comprehensive yet, so some other random content can slip through the cracks. For example, I was listening to a no-copyright music track called Icelanding Arpeggios, and I was shown a “Related” video along the side; a video synced from YouTube, which was of a man’s voice reading aloud Psalm 4 of the Old Testament with Icelanding Arpeggios playing in the background. The reason it was classified as “Related” wasn’t because some system was able to listen to the music in the video, but because the exact words “Icelanding Arpeggios” appeared in the description of said video about that Psalm. Here’s an example of “Related” suggestions. In this case they are working well and as intended, showing more video’s related to Solid-State batteries.
So the current unfortunate reality is that a video about, for example, how gravity works, occasionally may suggest “Related” content on the side about gravity not being real, that the earth is flat, and that the sun is 3,000 miles in the sky. Because, you know, it’s about the sun and gravity. The video’s are technically related in some way, but most people who are learning about the universe don’t want to see that, because it has no real scientific basis, is not widely accepted, and gravity and the ball earth has already been proven to be true.
After all, Odysee is still being developed, and their system’s for suggested “Related” content is still not fully matured.
Internet is full of MAGA garbage. Bittorrent DHT is full of MAGA garbage. What’s your point? There are ways to filter out what you don’t want to see.
If you can’t see the point, then I cannot help you.
The point of course is that if you don’t want to see it, you refuse to use any platform that allows others to see it. Which must make it awfully hard to use the internet. Surprised you manage to even use Lemmy.
Free speech is protection from government oppression. Last I checked, I’m not the government, neither is Lemmy, neither is any other site on the internet that doesn’t end in .gov (typically), and this isn’t a free speech issue despite what MAGA idiots would have people think. If the platform wants that shit there, so be it, and I won’t use it when it’s painted on their front page. I use Lemmy because I was here (on another instance originally) before the MAGA weirdos decided to join to spread their bullshit, so I’ve had time to curate – apparently I have to do it again, or simply leave this instance. I was also alive well before the MAGA weirdos decided to spread their fascist Nazi propaganda all over the place. There was once a world war about that – and they lost. I guess they don’t like being losers.
Just because I use the internet (which I have been doing since only a few years after the WWW was invented), doesn’t mean I have to tolerate bullshit when I see it. Perhaps if everyone was like this, the internet wouldn’t be the shithole it has become.
And I’m done responding now, because clearly you and many others in this thread will never understand, or even care to understand.
Free speech is protection from government oppression. Last I checked, I’m not the government, neither is Lemmy, neither is any other site on the internet that doesn’t end in .gov (typically), and this isn’t a free speech issue despite what MAGA idiots would have people think. If the platform wants that shit there, so be it, and I won’t use it when it’s painted on their front page. I use Lemmy because I was here (on another instance originally) before the MAGA weirdos decided to join to spread their bullshit, so I’ve had time to curate – apparently I have to do it again, or simply leave this instance.
This appears to be an argument against a position I wasn’t taking. You just appear to be upset that alternative video streaming sites don’t ban people you disagree with. Good luck with that.
Just because I use the internet (which I have been doing since only a few years after the WWW was invented), doesn’t mean I have to tolerate bullshit when I see it.
Hey, you may been around longer than I have. Only had the internet since the mid 90s. So it depends on how you define “a few”. It was a very different beast back then, and I for one miss the relative lack of concentrated corporate control and mandatory advertiser-friendliness.
Perhaps if everyone was like this, the internet wouldn’t be the shithole it has become.
I chalk that up to said concentrated corporate control and mandatory advertiser-friendliness, but then I don’t think it’s become a shithole because people I disagree with also have a voice, but because of aggressive monetization and the enshittification that that inevitably entails.
And I’m done responding now, because clearly you and many others in this thread will never understand, or even care to understand.
No, you are well understood. You are opposed to alternative video platforms (and apparently some other unnamed Lemmy instance) because those things do not necessarily reinforce your echo chamber, and you consider that reinforcement a vital feature. I’m waaay over on the far end of the spectrum, and chose my instance specifically because they do not defederate, they keep everything available and leave it up to the user to decide what they do or do not wish to see (and I to date have nothing blocked - no users, no communities, no servers).
I can see it, I just want you to spell it out that you are a fascist douchebag (everyone who wants to censor other opinions is that).
So…being anti-MAGA makes me fascist. Got it. And I never once said I wanted to censor opinions. Stop making shit up, you sound like a MAGA moron.
Good lord, they’re everywhere. Literal morons, everywhere.
Good lord, they’re everywhere. Literal morons, everywhere.
Its worse than that, maga are literal terrorists at this point, and supporting a convicted criminal trying to elect him king so he can get away with all those crimes, makes them partially culpable for all his crimes
If you can’t see the point, then I cannot help you.
That’s you.
Which other point can be made then?
If there’s a system containing MAGA stuff, but you won’t see it if you don’t want to, it’s as fine for any situation as a system without MAGA stuff for any goal which is not censorship of MAGA stuff.
Focused on “free speech”?
When I see that used multiple times by a platform operator it invariably means they’re right-wing wingnuts and/or the platform will devolve into right wing drivel while silencing dissent.
Yup. And on descriptive grounds, the whole thing falls into a false dichotomy: treating free speech as an all-or-nothing matter, instead treating freedom of speech as a scale. And that giving someone complete freedom of speech always means restricting the freedom of speech of someone else.
(I typically exemplify this through a guy with a megaphone in an offline plaza. Telling him to drop off the megaphone reduces his ability to reach willing listeners, thus his freedom of speech; but if you leave him alone nobody else can be heard, so their freedom of speech is lowered.)
Thank you, you put it better than I could. It’s not binary, it’s not all or nothing. You can have some freedom of speech and yet still not really have freedom of speech if you’re silenced by those who disagree.
Yes, your megaphone example is a special case of the paradox of tolerance. In this instance, tolerance of loud voices means quiet voices are drowned out.
It’s related - Popper’s paradox highlights that you can’t compromise with some people, while my focus is that you need to impose some limits.
It’s easy to tweak the example though, to be more like the paradox - if the megaphone guy is telling people to kick off the plaza some people, or saying stuff to make them leave.
Yes, or if multiple people get into a megaphone arms race and are all noise blasting each other so hard that no one can hear anything anymore.
The only way free speech can survive is with decentralized platforms like email and lemmy. Any time there is central control free speech isn’t.
This isn’t even a true statement. Mods are human and can silence views they don’t like.
Go post some progressive and democratic views or criticize authoritarian support over on the grad.ml side. See how long it is before you’re shut down, blocked or even banned. There’s no free speech rule just because the platform is decentralized.
The only mitigating factors are that you can have a platform for opposing views, but even that isn’t a guarantee here because the instance can be defederated and effectively silenced.
It’s free speech in a federated environment because someone can’t remove your voice.
It doesn’t obligate anyone to listen to you. So federated instances having opinions about who they talk to doesn’t contradict free speech.
People who want to talk about The Second Coming of the Space Pope are free to do so and don’t require any third party to let them do so.
Couldn’t that argument of different instances and their opinions be said about different centralised companies as well?
You think Lemmy has free speech? Some major mods here are quite liberal in controlling exactly what speech and ideas they allow their uses to be exposed to, and that is how it will always be by those desiring power over others.
Yes, Lemmy is 100% free speech.
We can make lemmy.spacepope.org and nobody can silence us. It doesn’t prevent other instances from refusing to listen to the truth of space, but those who want to participate can.
eyeroll
Link to an example where the platform in question has silenced dissent?
Looks like you care zilch for free speech. If you and others with this opinion cared for free speech, you would promote your own alternative ideas on those platforms to even things out, instead of whining that there’s more opposing views to yours on the platform than not.
Did you specifically skip past the past where I said they silence dissent?
But thanks for telling me what I believe.
Do they? Do you have evidence?
Because I’m interested in YT alternatives. I pay for Nebula, and I’m interested in other platforms as well, especially if they champion free speech (like, actual free speech, not whatever Musk means by “free speech”).
Sure. Me. I’ve had comments deleted by admins when I criticized things like Russia feeding arms to Iran, operating misinformation campaigns, and generally trying to destabilize democracies.
That’s lame. Was that before or after LBRY’s bankruptcy? I’m wondering if they’ve changed their admins.
“If you really cared about free speech you wouldn’t be using your free speech to call out Nazis”
- Install watch on odysee extension.
- Make a odysee account
- Continue your normal habits of watching YouTube but being redirected to odysee when creators have posted there.
- hurt YouTube just a little bit.
I’m so sick of hearing that odysee is only a nazi crypto scam. That content exists on every platform but by shitting all over every option that comes out and then whining when YouTube does more anti user crap is just ridiculous.
You don’t need to just use odysee. You can use YouTube for your recommendations then be redirected for the content. Eventually when recommendations are there it will be an easy transition for the majority of people but until then, at the very least don’t step on the face of a working competitor that has good intentions.
P.s. You don’t need to use the token, it was mostly just given to viewers and creators for free.
- Read stuff like this and love the idea.
- Never share this information anywhere.
- Check out the site but feel like creating an account is too much. I’m busy.
- Continue to never share information online.
- Complain about minor things on the site that I’d like improved.
- Hate that cool ideas never spread.
❤️
Exactly. Another awesome thing the extension provides is the ability to migrate all your YouTube subscriptions over to Odysee. You also have two options with the Watch on Odysee extension. You can 1: Make YouTube links immediately redirect to Odysee (default option), or 2: Have a “Watch on Odysee” button appear to the left of the subscribe button on every YouTube video that also exists on Odysee (Example screenshot). Choosing the latter option means you don’t need to disable the extension every time you want to comment on a YouTube video.
Another thing people keep doing is acting like Odysee is a free speech absolutist platform, in that they allow you to say and post absolutely anything. This is not true, because they have community guidelines which do not allow hate speech and promotion of violence (two examples). It’s just less strict and more fair in it’s moderation practices than YouTube.
Some Links: Firefox extension (can’t find it for Chrome, for some reason); Community Guidelines
Edit: If you want the extension on Chrome, you can get it directly from GitHub. You may need to view a guide if you don’t know how to install extensions manually.
I’m so sick of hearing that odysee is only a nazi crypto scam.
It’s like 98% uncontrolled extremist garbage. I can take or leave the crypto but the actual content is just so awful. We have better options.
Odysee is is one of the few alternative platforms with a decent left wing audience. The only other majority progressive platforms are Mastodon and Lemmy, though Lemmy has a lot of neo-progressive tankies and angry conservative tankies.
Nice, but the platform we need more is Peertube
PeerTube is great too
It never seems to load, is my hardened browser breaking peering ? What exactly needs to be whitelisted ?
I’m going to try setting up an instance but one issue with it that I see is that instance owners will be the only permitted uploaders for most instances since storage and bandwidth is a huge issue when it comes to video hosting platforms.
I know it sounds like capitalist crep, but Peertube needs a solid form of monitization (I think).
Creating videos is expensive and hosting videos is expensive. Without a source of income for creators it cannot survive.
It’s more market anarchism than capitalism IMO. The factors of production here are controlled 100% by its users, not whoever last bought the whole thing.
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I remember liking the idea of Odysee, but that turned rather quickly
Didn’t know about its existence but as they were proclaiming free speech that immediately sets off alarm bells. Sad to see my suspicion is once again correct.
Yep. Use FastLBRY, not Odysee
Edit: huh… it might be dead now?
You just made an excellent point without realizing it. #mayflies
Most of advertisers don’t care.
Thank goodness we have Lemmies ensuring no alternative tech can threaten YouTube. I was worried people might actually be against Odyssey in the comments
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You know that’s exactly what people say about Mastadon and in some cases Lemmy right?
Just a thing to think about, free speech is always going to appeal to Nazis, just as it should for most other people. Freedom of speech in the American sense where certain speech is not protected (such as screaming fire in a movie theater when there is no fire) is a right that we should continue to attempt to protect, even from people we disagree with (within reason, as mentioned above).
Sure. And Nazism is a direct threat not protected by freedom of expression.
I don’t disagree in the slightest, hopefully you understood what I meant though.
We understood, it just didn’t contribute anything and appeared to actively defend nazis.
Lol k
The portion of the left that seeks to censor everything, removing people’s freedoms in a misguided attempt to stop terrible ideas from spreading are just shooting yourselves in the foot long term. I say this as a staunch lefty
Not that anyone here cares to see nuance evidenced by somehow turning my comment into Nazi apologism regardless of what I directly stated.
screaming fire in a movie theater when there is no fire
This scenario always reminds me of the very first part of this speech on free speech from Christopher Hitchens.
(such as screaming fire in a movie theater when there is no fire)
This idiom comes from an analogy in a SCOTUS opinion arguing that checks notes it’s a violation of the Espionage Act to distribute flyers that oppose the draft. That case was later partly overturned in Brandenburg v Ohio and the standard is that speech isn’t incitement unless it is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action. To the point that “$SLUR should hang from trees” is probably protected speech (because the lawless action isn’t imminent), but “you guys, grab that $SLUR over there so we can string them up!” probably isn’t.
So defending free speech inevitably means defending white supremacists and the like because free speech doesn’t actually protect anything if it doesn’t protect upsetting, outrageous, or offensive speech (and likewise, the arbiter of what counts as offensive is not guaranteed to always be on your side). It’s why the ACLU has defended them on more than one occasion. H.L. Mencken put it best.
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” ― H.L. Mencken
Thanks, said what I was implying 👍
This Lemmy community is actually more pro-mainstream than Reddit and YouTube combined. Thank you for pointing this out. Time to go.
Not familiar with Odysse, how’s they’re content moderation? We don’t need another fascist platform.
I started digging into Odyssey some time ago when I found electro boom and big Clive were posting there. Immediately there was a lot of trash, like mostly trash. I went ahead and created an account where I could actually block content makers. I started off just blocking the wheel offensive ones anyone spouting libtards and woke. Moved into blocking clinate deniers and anti-vaxs, flat earthers. I just sit there and block 40 or 50 every time I logged in. Slowly, the content became less offensive overall. But you start running into the problem where they’re all just videos from the same 30 preppers showing you how to make eggs in a $5,000 freeze dryer. I eventually started blocking the annoying and repetitive stuff. I haven’t checked recently, but in its heyday the content just wasn’t there even if you got rid of all the other crap you didn’t want to see
You had me at the ability to block content creators. The fact that YouTube doesn’t have this is insane.
YouTube has a “Don’t recommend this channel” option. Which, as far as I can tell, does actually get them to stop recommending the channel on the main recommended feed. If you’re subscribed they’ll still show up in your subscriptions and will still show up in search if you look for them (to the extent that anything relevant shows up in search).
The option isn’t prominent, it’s in the “3-dot” menu next to a video on the recommended feed and I’ve been unable to find a way to view or manage the list of blocked channels, but it’s there.
Edit: a word - “able” to “unable”
Yeah, this is an option on YouTube.
On Odysee, there’s both the option to “Block” channels, or seperately “Mute” channels. You can also manage your blocked and muted channels separately under Profile > Settings > Content Settings > Blocked and muted channels. According to this page in the official Help Hub:
Blocking: “When you block a user, the blocked user can no longer comment on any of your content, channel, or comment threads. In addition to this, all comments and reactions left by the blocked user on your content, channel, or in the comments section, will be filtered for everyone.”
Muting: “When you mute a user, you will no longer see them in any comment sections, replies, search results, homepage, related content, or anywhere else. They’re hidden from your experience on Odysee.”
So basically, if you don’t want to see their content (including comments); mute them. If you don’t want them to talk to you or be seen in your own channels’ comment sections by both yourself or others; block them. If you want absolutely nothing to do with them, you can both block and mute them simultaneously. Note: The article shows how to block/mute them from within the comments section. You can also block/mute them from the channel page itself or by clicking the 3-dots beside their video thumnail.
u don’t want them to talk to you or be seen in your own channels’ comment sections by both yourself or others; block them. If you want absolutely nothing to do with them, you can both block and mute them simultaneously. Note: The article shows how to block/mute them from within the comments section. You can also block/mute them from the channel page itself or by clicking the 3-dots beside their video thumnail.
I did that, took me a couple weeks. There were a handful of content creators left.
Yeah, I find that since so many people watch such different content from each other, it means that whether or not the content on a smaller platform like Odysee is actually interesting to people, tends to be hit or miss. It still needs more growth fix that issue. I still watch a lot of YouTube though, and Odysee has their own official extension which allows you to choose to either redirect YouTube links to Odysee (if the same video officially exists there), or show a “Watch on Odysee” button right YouTube’s “Subscribe” button.
I noticed there wasn’t enough gameplay videos of the games that I like, and hardly any game soundtracks uploaded, so I started uploading my full game playthrough’s and game OST’s to a couple of channels for the people who also have my taste in videos. Oh yeah, fun fact: You can also have multiple channels on the same account and quickly switch between them. It’s pretty cool. The extension even lets you transfer your subs over from YT.
how’s they’re content moderation
go there, you’ll se it immediately… loads of maga terrorist garbage
I used to like Odysee until I saw them clearly promote conspiracy theories and far-right, almost Nazi rhetoric on the homepage.
Guys, just because the backbone of your site is decentralized doesn’t mean your centralized frontend can’t be modified by you.
They never even made a single attempt to help others develop alternative frontends too, so the decentralization there was more akin to decentralization theater.
Unfortunately that’s one of the problems with a lot of alternative platforms.
You would think there’d be some decentralized video hosting thing popular with us Fediverse types but in practice they’re all the low spots in the gutter in which the densest shit gathers. Most of the audience is on Youtube, and you only migrate to an alternative site if you’ve been banned from Youtube, and the folks who haven’t been banned from Youtube don’t tend to want to go stand next to the people who have so it’s difficult for legitimate content creators to adopt those alternative platforms.
Dailymotion still exists and I think you can still upload there but I know of no “dailymotioners.” Vimeo seems to have gone in a b2b direction, Twitch is mainly for live streaming, Tiktok succeeded where Vine failed, Nebula was some Youtubers starting their own Netflix with blackjack and hookers, Floatplane was LMG starting their own Netflix with blackjack and hookers, then you’ve got the several porn sites of varying dubiousness, and then down in the sump you’ve got the likes of LBRY and Odysee.
There are a few creators out there that publish multiple places. If it doesn’t cost to publish, we could start encouraging more people to publish more places. The biggest problem is you do actually have a chance to get paid on Youtube. Most of the content worth watching is only doing it because they can make money
See that is what I think would eventually allow another platform to take off, is publishing to two sites at once.
Google’s Adsense…I guess there are people making useful amounts of money with it? A lot of Youtubers seem to prefer having their own sponsors and do the ad read themselves and/or have some service like Patreon to allow their audience to fund them directly. Especially since that revenue won’t just disappear on the whims of an algorithm like Adsense money will. “We’ve demonetized and age restricted this video. Reason? coin came up tails.”
Guys, just because the backbone of your site is decentralized doesn’t mean your centralized frontend can’t be modified by you.
They never, ever stated the content on Odysee can’t be removed; this is a misunderstanding spread by both people who don’t use the platform, and even a lot who do use the platform but haven’t properly done their research about how the platform works. They can’t not have content removed since they are still legally required to remove illegal content, such as that which breaks copyright law, for example, pirates uploading full-length movies. Than when people find out that content can in fact be removed, they call Odysee a lair for something they never claimed.
They never even made a single attempt to help others develop alternative frontends too, so the decentralization there was more akin to decentralization theater.
Fair complaint.
As if Youtube didn’t promote conspiracy theories and almost Nazi rhetorics that serve the country it’s based in. They do, which they don’t call as such. Everything else they’ll call conspiracy theories and propaganda.
So that makes odysee’s behaviour OK?
Nothing. But mentioning it, don’t forget to mention Youtube as well.
The difference between Odysee and YouTube is that YouTube doesn’t claim to be a free speech platform that allows any possible statements on, and does often take down a lot of the harmful content. You only see the remainder, not the whole.
Odysee is quite small, and as such, could relatively easily moderate much more of the content on its platform, if they actually cared about doing so.
Odysee explicitly tries to allow as much speech as possible, claiming that they totally won’t allow any bad content, while in reality, platforming LGBTQ+ misinformation, white nationalist rhetoric, anti-immigrant propaganda, etc.
All of those violate their Community Guidelines, by the way. But remember, it’s guidelines, not actual policy as to what they remove.
I have no idea why you’re being downvoted since you’re 100% correct. I watch one video about gaming and YouTube’s recommendations are all alt-right anti-feminist stuff with Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.
Google surely knows enough about me to know I lean far-left but the algorithm is determined to feed me that slop.
I have no idea from a technical perspective if Odysee’s algorithm is independent from or worse than YouTube’s, but the criticism of YouTube is completely valid.
They’re being downvoted because one platform being shitty doesn’t excuse another from it.
See: Tu Quoque
I didn’t read the argument as saying one platform’s behavior excuses the other. I saw it as saying that both are bad.
It certainly doesn’t come across as a defense of either platform to say they’re both infested by Nazis.
I have watched super progressive content on Youtube but also watched conservative content as well. It’s possible there are a lot of progressives who also watch content from the other side so the algorithm pushes it.
that’s why you should be logged out of Google and also delete your cookies periodically :) To reset the memory of Google
The thing is that I do want to have my subscriptions and favorite channels, and as long as UBO blocks ads, I haven’t fully made the switch to a different front-end.
But it still bothers me that it serves me far-right, religious, and conspiracy theory content given that I’ve never once engaged with any of those topics.
Fox news seems to own YT’s algorithm as far as I can tell.
Never a click from me, but 6 of the top 10 news vids every time.
i almost never watch news on yt, haven’t gotten any.
Guys, just because the backbone of your site is decentralized doesn’t mean your centralized frontend can’t be modified by you.
I don’t understand what you’re saying here. Did you mean can be modified? Or what does this have to do with Nazi rhetoric? Maybe you have a different idea about the word “frontend”?
Sorry if my wording was unclear, let me rephrase.
Odysee is the platform, the site, the frontend, and the company. LBRY was the backend, the blockchain-based system that actually stored the videos themselves.
Odysee was the main interface to interact with the videos stored on LBRY, to essentially act like YouTube, but the videos were technically available to anyone.
Odysee then used the justification that the backend was decentralized to say that they had to remain entirely neutral to any content on Odysee, because a decentralized system inherently cannot have its content censored by one party.
This ignored the fact that they could choose to modify which videos their frontend would show to users. They acted as if this was not possible, even though it was.
Thus, a decent YouTube alternative with some good creators on it refused to censor any nazi content that started making its way there because YouTube rightfully deplatformed its supporters, and let it infect the platform without doing anything to stop it, pretending as if they had no choice, while in reality, it just brought them more revenue.
It’s a shame because the thing that kills alternative platforms is getting flooded with racists to the point that they drive everyone else out.
A lot of “free speech” platforms box themselves into a corner by declaring themselves “free speech” platforms while intending that to mean they won’t ban users for mild wrongthink, but then white supremacists show up, and if they get banned then they start causing a massive shitstorm over the fact that the platform isn’t truly supporting free speech. Then they drive out all the normal people who don’t want to be associated with them and the platform is forced to shutdown.
Then you have morons like Tim Pool who will endlessly attack “free speech” platforms if they ban white supremacists.
Oh right, so you were talking about the content, that’s not what I understood under “frontend”. Thanks for clearing it up.
I don’t have any experience with the platform, so I’m not in a position to judge their decisions, but it’s always tricky when you present yourself as censor free. There’s things you obviously don’t want on your service, but if it falls within the legal realm, it is no longer a matter of “will we block Nazi material” but whether from that point onward you start taking a moral and political stance.
Things get incredibly tricky and cumbersome if you choose that route, not just from an administrative perspective but also technically. I can understand why the people who operate the platform would prefer to primarily use legality as a deciding factor, as not every ideological issue that you open yourself up to if you take the other route is as straightforward as fascism.
the ideal path would be to censor nazi stuff on their frontend and also support others making their own frontends. that way they’re truly free speech, everyone can use the backend, but they don’t promote the bad shit
“free-speech” ❌ “you can say shit uncontrolably” ✅
You cannot say things “uncontrollably” as there is still a community guidelines set of rules that just aren’t as strict as YouTube’s, plus the ability to report is there too. Despite being a free speech platform, it is still legally required not to host illegal content, and so these community guidelines absolutely must be there. If the comments or videos directly promote violence or hatred (just two examples), they are grounds for removal by site moderators. They are usually only removed when people report them, though, since the moderation team likely isn’t very large at this point in time.
In my 2 years with Odysee, I’ve found one person earlier this year directly promoting extreme violence in a comment section. That’s one time too many; but it’s still a long time. I reported them, and they were removed. I don’t know how long it took for them to remove it though, because I only checked if the comment was still there after a couple of weeks; and it wasn’t; so I can’t speak for the swiftness of the moderators in their actions yet.
One problem is when sometimes reporting doesn’t work, and the shit stays there possibly forever, even after “human” review.
Well if you report a video about a conspiracy theory for example, it won’t be removed unless it directly promotes or incites violence or hatred toward a particular person or group(s) if people. You may not like the content, but if it does not break the rules specifically laid out in the guidelines, it is not grounds for removal. The platforms goal is to allow as much free speech as is reasonable (and legal), not to allow people to say absolutely anything they want with no repercussions.
I was a big fan of odysee but once LBRY lost to the SEC I figured it would die or change horribly. Im not sure who owns odysee now, how hosting works on it now that LBRY has been dissolved, or whos mining rigs are running the decentralized lbry blockchain that still presumably powers odysee. I need to know the details in clear detail before I trust it again on a technical level. I am more skeptical of crypto now and think a paid patreon membership peertube instance may be the best way to go. Peertubes biggest issue is scaling hosting cost as it gets bigger and donations can’t keep up as well as lifetime of an instance. If I host my videos on your site and a year later it goes dark or they were deleted because the server maintainer just didn’t want them taking up space, thats kind fustrating.
r they were deleted because the server maintainer just didn’t want them taking up space, thats kind frustrating.
Yeah, the onus is on us to keep the backups and perhaps reseed if necessary. The whole part where Youtube is a massive free unlimited hosting library is not sustainable eventually. Crypto has always been a grift with a variable lifespan, it just funds the services while it’s in it’s bubble.
Odysee was owned by LBRY before the LBRY company was dissolved. They were founded by the same team of people who created the LBRY company, and the LBRY network/protocol (the decentralised part), but are not themselves the same company. So the LBRY company going away was never going to dissolve Odysee also, which is why they still exist today. LBRY (the company) dissolving did not affect the content on Odysee because the LBRY network/protocol itself is open-source and decentralised; and LBRY being sued and dying does not somehow make the LBRY network/protocol illegal for Odysee (or anyone) to use. If Odysee had gone away, anyone else could have jumped in and made a new replacement frontend for the LBRY network/protocol (Odysee is a frontend for LBRY, after all).
About a month ago, Odysee announced that they would be moving away from the LBRY network over to the Arweave network. Now, I’m not sure when they are going to do this, but it appears that at the minute they are still using the LBRY network/protocol for content uploads. The reason I think they are still using LBRY at this very minute, is that when I uploaded a video to my Odysee channel yesterday, I noticed in my personal uploads page that it was still using the lbry:// at the beginning of it’s address on the network.
ngl i should also post my yt videos on peertube and odysee
ngl you should 😂
I don’t know if PeerTube has the option, but with Odysee, there’s an option to automatically sync your existing YouTube channel with Odysee. It will bring over the video, the description, and will be uploaded in full quality; the comment section will be separate though, so the comments on Odysee are by Odysee users themselves.
ok that is life saving peertube its hard finding a server
How… How are they gonna pay for bandwidth if there aren’t any ads?
They also earn money from the optional premium subscriptions, the 5% cut from channel donations, and 100% of the donations sent directly to them. The way the direct donations work is by going to a video, and just below it, clicking the “$ Support” button and making the donation either via cash or LBC. That’s an option for all channels on the platform.
Otherwise, I don’t know the ins-and-outs of how the decentralised blockchain system works, but they do not have to host all of the sites content themselves, as it is also voluntarily hosted by other users. I’m not sure how this works at the moment; it previously worked by being a user of the LBRY Desktop app, but after the LBRY company shut down, and the LBRY app went away, I’m not sure how other people host the pieces of that content anymore. They are moving away from the LBRY blockchain protocol, over to the Arweave protocol, so I imagine they will bring out an Arweave app that may replace the LBRY app which that was used previously.
I just synced my youtube channel with odysee… Yeah a bunch of alt right trash is floating around but the only way to change that is to drown it out with actual content. The more normal content uploaded the less breathing room for the outrageous bullshit in feeds. Hopefully my library helps.
Awesome! What’s your channel?
Unfortunately I can’t share it on this account but it’s a channel for the maker community and related tools :P
Cool, yeah that’s fair enough. I was unsure about sharing my own channel here too, considering I’m very careful about my privacy.
Ditto lol I spent a long time changing accounts and setting up new ones to have a unified handle across the net I can just share my real opinions about lol gotta keep it up it’s hard work out here.
Legitimately first time hearing about Odysee… Impressed, this could actual be a YouTube replacement.
I’m glad my reaching out has helped find people who’ve never heard of it. It’s got quite a lot of users, but has been growing very slowly in user-base the last few years, simply due to not enough people talking about it and allowing natural growth of the platform.
Is this not a neo-Nazi/far right platform? I only ever see them linking antivax and evropa content on Odysee. That’s where I’ve heard of it.
It isn’t exclusively a Neo-Nazi platform, but it is a free-speech absolutist platform, so they have absolutely no problem platforming Nazis.
It’s basically the 4chan of tube sites. All are welcome, but if you aren’t a fascist you probably won’t fit in.
If one Nazi is allowed into a bar, it’s a Nazi bar. I’ll continue to steer clear.
To be honest, I’ve been using the website and I notice nothing of this. I can click a few links and get to said content, yes, but my feed and some of the categories I check are on par with YouTube. The only big difference I experience is that there’s much more content of smaller content creators.
I ain’t a fascist, Neo-Nazi, far-rightist, or any of the things Odysee is falsely marked by people as being, and I fit in just fine with my fellow Odysee users. Stop attacking one of the only companies who are truly trying to be the change they want to see in the world.
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I agree with most of your points, but “anti physically and mentally disabled”? Really? Your source describes how they reuploaded unsubtitled lectures for the sake of preservation. This is hardly a villanous move and has nothing to do with “not caring about deaf people”. Let’s keep the arguments honest, you have plenty else to stick them with that’s actually substantial.
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something something if there’s a nazi at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 nazis
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I don’t really think that’s true, so long as you stay off the tankie instance. I have it blocked.
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Far right content is more common than on YouTube because of the guidelines, but in my experience the largest parts are crypto, privacy and similar, also a decent amount is gaming (at least that’s what I upload)
I’ve noticed that the Linux and open-source community is pretty big there, too; with a lot of them being part of the privacy community. I’m a part of this community on Odysee.
In my experience the Linux people are considerably more on peertube compared to its site, but this may just specific to the channels I watch
I don’t use PeerTube much, but I plan to. This is probably why I didn’t know it was bigger with Linux users. Though it makes sense since I tend to see PeerTube mentioned and linked to far more often on the internet than Odysee.
Pretty much, unfortunately. And the people who run Odysee have repeatedly, time and time again, defended Nazis, white supremacists, far-right conspiracies, videos calling for genocide, etc.
Although in fairness, to my knowledge they haven’t done what Musk has done for example and said “free speech [Unless you disagree with dear leader, then it’s an account ban]!” Left-wing content is left alone (not that there’s much of it on Odysee)
I mirror my stuff from youtube over there and I do not fall into these categories. To be fair, I have the tiniest of audiences anyway, so… doesn’t really matter either way.
Haven’t checked in on Odyssee for a while though. Not sure if the auto mirror thing still works.
I mirror my stuff from youtube over there and I do not fall into these categories
Same.
And I’ve noticed that there seems to be a very small user base there.
My videos and most in my niche only get 10s of views on Odysee.
When I go browsing around outside of my niche, I tend to find quite a bit of right wing conspiracy stuff. Not really who I want to be associated with, but it’s not nearly as bad as some of the other (now failed) "free speech " video platforms that came before it.
Cool. What’s your channel? I have a gaming channel for no-commentary playthrough’s. It’s not synced from YouTube, though.
I found your channel, and yeah, your latest YouTube uploads are still being synced to Odysee.
You sometimes see that stuff on Odysee because they don’t censor it, unless it promotes violence or hatred to individuals. They do have community guidelines after all, since they can’t legally host… illegal content. In that sense there is censorship because they can’t not censor things to some extent; but the free speech and large lack of censorship is their goal regardless. As an Odysee user for over 2 years, this is the minority of content on the platform. Where you do see that content that breaks the rules… that’s what the report button is for.
My understanding was that Odysee served the purpose to upload videos that could no longer be uploaded on YouTube due to YouTube’s community guidelines. The time I checked out that website the front page was full of manosphere types and the Evropa documentary and anti vax crap
That was never the purpose of the platform, otherwise it would have been marketed that way. The platform allows more content than YouTube does, so it’s not far-fetched to assume that people would use the platform for that, and tell others they should use the platform because of that. What random people on the internet promoted the platform being good for is not the same thing as the platform owners themselves creating the platform for that very purpose. If you really care about the “purpose” of the platform, just watch some of LBRY’s oldest videos on the platform from before the Odysee frontend even existed yet for LBRY; where they were first revealing their visions for the platform and the progress they had made.
Also note that plenty of people upload stuff to Odysee for their preservation efforts. Just because some documentary that talks about medical misinformation or promotes a conspiracy theory (for example), exists on the platform; it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s there to promote the idea; it’s simply there so that people who want to see the video can see it. I’ll watch content that was censored from YouTube and other big-tech social media platforms because I just want to see what was said. People have the right to that level of freedom; Odysee provides it because they should.
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Most of those videos are also found on YouTube. I would expect that you don’t see those videos suggested to you because the algorithm has learned what you like to watch.
If you open up YouTube with a VPN and in a private tab you’ll likely get search results that include a mix from both the right and the left.
I’d rather not link to them, but from the ones you circled, these are the videos that I found on YouTube while doing a quick search:
- The Babylon Bee video
- The Paris Olympics opening ceremony video
- The Assassins Creed video
Now please excuse me as I purge my history…
Well I never happened to see anything related to these topics on Odysee. I mostly used to follow tech stuff as my other hobbies like cars and basketball aren’t really present on the platform.
If you have some favourite YouTube channels from the cars and basketball world, you should try contacting them personally and asking them to sync their channel with Odysee. Even if they choose not to; at least they’ve heard of it now, know at least some of their audience may want them to, and may consider it in the future 🙂.
It might not work asking in YouTube comments though, but it’s worth a try. The reason I say this is I’ve personally tried it multiple times over the past year, and strangely I’ve been noticing that YouTube appear to be switching between banning the word “Odysee” spelled specifically that way, and not banning it. I would comment something with the word Odysee, and no matter what happens, it would immediately disappear the moment I refresh the page – commenting anything else would work fine. A few months later, I tried it again and it worked. Some time after that, it stopped working again, and it was like that for quite a while. Fast forward a month or two, and I again checked it a few days ago, and it seems to be currently working again; and all my previous comments from the past about Odysee have reappeared in my comment history, when they previously would not appear in my comment history. So now could be a good time to comment. It wasn’t a glitch with my account, because I tried it with two separate ones.
I can see my favorite channel now “I have zero interest in learning a new platform to have to figure out, I have a hard enough time with the mainstream sources” lmao
we went over this with Twitter, “I am not learning another social platform, when Twitter dies I will just not have any SM Presense except discord”
What are you quoting? I didn’t say any of that.
There may be content generators on there you can label that way, but that doesn’t make the platform neo-nazi.
You take all of the stuff excluded from a big platform and put it on a small platform, and it’ll swamp every other topic out. If as a platform runner you feel that you should not censor others, then this can happen.
On the flip side, there’s nothing stopping other with less controversial opinions to post there as well. Nobody is going to be told their channel about supercars isnt racist enough, or their politics channel is too-left communist.
Strongly disagree with you. If you have a bar that tolerates Nazis, you’ll find that bar becomes a Nazi bar over time. To commingle with Nazis is to accept them and their ideology.
I’d have a very hard time sending people to my videos if they sit next to a white replacement theory video.
I think Odysee has created far fewer Nazis than sites with addiction exploiting algorithms that say they remove such topics.
TIL Odysee had ads. UBO FTW
Edit; tbf, I haven’t been on it in a long long while. Generally too extremist for me.
That’s kinda the issue for a platform like that, at least in the early stages. You’ll get all the people who’ve been kicked off YouTube, and not the mainstream content.
Very true! Lemmy wasn’t super like that, but then again, reddit allowed nearly anything (apparently including csam to a certain degree). Then the API debacle, and that crap came here. Yt is more strict on certain things, which pushes those scourges of society to these platforms that are in their early stages, giving them an abysmal reputation.
Yeah, there wasn’t much that didn’t fly on Reddit, and banning a subreddit usually meant those users spread their bile elsewhere on the platform. The platform was self policing to an extent, in the fact that anyone too extreme became a topic of mockery elsewhere and weren’t really taken seriously.
I mean Lemmy was like that though. After the exodus from Reddit most major instances defederated from hexbear which is like the OG Lemmy instance
This is ahistorical. The original Lemmy instance is lemmy.ml, and it was hugely tankie literally from the beginning - the .ml referring to marxist-leninism, years before Reddit’s API changes. It’s nothing to do with people being banned from Reddit, it’s just that the concept of a federated message board platform was appealing to communist software developers, who created and guided the project. If anything, the anti-tankie sentiment which is popular on instances like lemmy.world is what came to lemmy after the Reddit exodus.
Tankies have never really been regularly banned on Reddit in any real extent.
Lemmy got like that after the exodus. No? I mean, I saw some BS here and there, but not nearly as much as right before the hexbear nonsense. Granted, I wasn’t on here much, and using a now defunct username, but I still didn’t see nearly as much.
Lemmy sort of started with people that got banned from Reddit
You can get banned from reddit?? That doesn’t bode well haha
I got perma-banned from a (mainstream, ordinary) sub for — and I’m really not joking here — criticising the “Caravan of Death”, which was a fascist death squad used by Chilean dictator Pinochet to assassinate political opponents in 1973.
I asked the mod team if they could specify the rule I broke, and then clearly they asked a Reddit admin to block my entire account, because that’s what happened.
Maybe I could appeal and get the account back, but I don’t really care that much.
You can get randomly banned on reddit.
Yeah, just endorse punching Nazis, a friend of mine got banned from Reddit for that.
