Oops, forgot to link the original article. Fixed.

It just looks like “Loo wan tee” to me.

Edit: Actually, just read the article, and considering the name Luanti is a mix between the Finnish word “creation” and the LUA programming language; and I’m preeetty sure LUA is pronounced “loo-wah” or “lew-ah”, I think the Luanti pronunciation is more likely to be “loo-wun-tee”.

Cool, yeah that’s fair enough. I was unsure about sharing my own channel here too, considering I’m very careful about my privacy.

Yeah, it’s referring to the memberships you can begin as a monthly donation to specific creators, not the Premium subscription that directly supports Odysee.

Cool, thanks.

There is moderation, the ability to report content and comments, and community guidelines. Odysee having a complete lack of moderation is a myth, and I have personally had content removed by moderators before by reporting it.

I’ve never cared to generate income on my own channel, so I’m not sure how all of it works. But the main way that I know of is through channel tips. There’s a ($ Support) button below every channel and content upload, which lets you directly tip the creator. You can use Patreon or anything else if you want to, but the functionality is built in. Odysee gets a 5% cut of all the tips sent to channels. There may be other ways of making money, but I’m not aware of what they might be.

Edit: Heres’s their help page about monetization: https://help.odysee.tv/category-monetization/

Awesome! What’s your channel?

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.

It does. You can get it on the Google Play Store or F-Droid. F-Droid version is very outdated though. You can always officially get the latest version directly from apk.odysee.tv.

I only found out about that link to the latest version a few days ago, and I was previously using the F-Droid version to avoid using Google services. I don’t know how much better the latest version is, but my experience with the very outdated F-Droid version was that the app was very slow and laggy. I heard that performance tends to be quite good or terrible depending on your phone; my phone is just a cheap android phone from a few years ago, so it makes sense it didn’t run well for me. I haven’t tested the latest version yet.

Thanks. It was probably because you said you used a cryptocurrency, and “You use crypto; crypto bad”. I got a down-vote too, probably for the same reason of saying I wanted to pay with Monero.

Edit: I now know that this banner is not an ad for Odysee’s premium subscriptions as it may seem to be. Memberships are separate to Premium entirely. Memberships are like the “Join” button you find on YouTube, where you pay a donation to that specific content creator and may get bonuses such as a badge next to your name in the comments, early access to videos, etc. depending on what benefits the creator chose themselves. Odysee only gets a 5% cut from this. This is completely justified as being the only thing that is arguably an ad on the site, as it is purely there to help creators thrive on the platform, and it can also be hidden permanently by clicking the X at the top-right of the banner; so they aren’t even being forceful about it either. The ads being removed were mainly referring to the pop-up ads that third-parties could place on the website.

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.

What bloat? And Spyware…?

The only trackers they use are onetrust geolocation cookie, which determines the country and state/city, but not exact location, based on your IP address. Than there’s googletagmanager, which I agree they should remove just for being Google.

Calling them spyware for the tiny speck of data-collection they do is petty, when you’re completely ignoring the things that prove they specifically care about privacy. For one, you can sign up completely anonymously; secondly, you can comment and post videos under the name “Anonymous”; thirdly, according to their Privacy Policy:

Third-party disclosure: We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your Personally Identifiable Information unless we provide users with advance notice. This does not include website hosting partners and other parties who assist us in operating our website, conducting our business, or serving our users, so long as those parties agree to keep this information confidential…

Fourth: they are the only website I’ve ever known of to actually respect the “Do Not Track” setting that you can explicitly toggle in your browser settings. There is no standard way of managing “Do Not Track” signals in the industry, so 99% of websites have no systems in place to stop themselves collecting your data when this browser setting is enabled.

There’s some tracking they were doing prior to their ads removal a few days ago in regards to what ads you were clicking on. But everything related to ads will likely be removed from the policy very soon, as the policy was last updated in 2021 when they were still serving ads. Example:

We, along with third-party vendors such as Google use first-party cookies (such as the Google Analytics cookies) and third-party cookies (such as the DoubleClick cookie) or other third-party identifiers together to compile data regarding user interactions with ad impressions and other ad service functions as they relate to our website.

Odysee is not spyware, and nor is it bloated. Even if you could argue it has some amount of bloat (which is usually subjective, so you probably can); it still wouldn’t be anywhere near the 50x more bloat that YouTube, the very thing they are trying to be an alternative to, have themselves.

❤️

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.

Thanks for all your suggestions mate. I’m going to favourite your comment so I can come back to it at some point to remind myself to look into them.

Edit: Hold on, why did you delete your comment that I replied “Good on you” to? I can’t remember what it said now. All I know about it is that you said you pay for Mullvad VPN with Monero, and that that it had an adblocker.

But “freedom of speech absolutism” is only ever used as an argument by shitty people trying to say shitty things. Free speech doesn’t mean you should be free from repercussions from your peers.

Me commenting on Odysee that LibreWolf is a great browser for privacy, or that SuperTuxKart and Veloren are good open source games is me saying shitty things, is it? You don’t even know the things that are said by the people you are talking about who advocate free speech absolutism. Further, Odysee inherently does not allow an absolutist level of free speech (it legally can’t), which is the whole reason they have community guidelines that must be followed.

Edit: I accidentally seemed to be implying that I was a free speech absolutist when I am not. I do not believe that people should be allowed to promote violence or hatred of any kind; Odysee doesn’t allow this either. What I DO believe, is that those people should be allowed to express through speech what their own views are; even Nazi’s; as long as they aren’t promoting Nazism, violence, hatred or similar. So no, I am not being a devils advocate, because if the platform was completely 100% free speech to the point where it actually allows true hate speech, promotion or encouragement of violence and hatred etc., I wouldn’t be supporting the platform and defending it at all. If it were like that and I was still promoting it, than fair… calling me a devil’s advocate would make sense.

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.

Yes, but usually it’s the videos that are synced to Odysee directly from YouTube which contain these sponsored segments. I’ve never seen an Odysee exclusive video before that has a sponsored segment, because the platform isn’t big enough for advertisers to care.