LBRY - Acting according to spec

Disclaimer

This is a opinion piece, not revised, typed in the spur of the moment just from memory. Reader discrecion is advised.

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Libraries. Places full of knowledge, neatly stacked into seemingly endless shelves, all at your arms reach for no cost at all. All you have to do is reach out and start learning.

If this was a small piece about actual libraries, you could pretty much do that paragraph over there and be done with it. Maybe too much "poetic" and long winded just to describe a place where people often dump stuff they don't need, but others may look for. No, wait. That's a thrift store.

What we're gonna talk about today is a different library, called LBRY.

Explanations for dumb people like myself and...myself

But...What is LBRY to begin with?

Rather than boring you with technical aspects that you and 99% of people don't give two tosses about, let's come up with the simplest explanation to what this project is.

LBRY is, according to their website:

A free, open, and community-run digital marketplace. You own your data. You control the network. Indeed, you are the network. Hollywood films, college lessons, amazing streamers and more are on the first media network ruled by you.

But that doesn't tell you anything about what it is! It's just a description of what you can do with it. Let's try getting another pitcher:

Watch, read, and play in a decentralized digital library controlled by the community.

That one up there is also a bit too ellusive and doesn't really tell us anything about what LBRY actually is, but rather what we can do with it.

Okay! Third time is the charm:

It might be easier to start with what LBRY is not: it is not just another corporate media service like YouTube or iTunes or Spotify. It is first and foremost a new protocol that allows artists to upload their content to a network of hosts (like BitTorrent) and set a price per stream or download (like iTunes) or give it away for free (like YouTube without ads). What makes this all possible is the blockchain technology developed by the founder of Bitcoin. Do you have to understand any of this to use and enjoy LBRY? No. Does it still matter to users? Yes!

Okay. Now that is a bit more clear. So LBRY is like a torrent client with some sort of digital currency going on and you don't even have to understand much of it in order to even use it.

At first glance, that sounds fantastic, right? A place where I can sell shit and have control over everything? Sign me in now!

That's the impression you have. And I also encourage you to check LBRY's Twitter in order to see all the awesomeness you are missing by not downloading this revolutionary app right fucking now!

Terms and conditions may apply, even though we never bothered to tell you what they were

But, is there anything wrong? I mean, all the marketing material and pitchers make it sound awesome and something I should be using right now!

Before we delve into that further, let me explain how I learned about LBRY.

My first experience with LBRY happened when I learned about it from "Linux Sucks" star [Bryan Lunduke] (http://lunduke.com/) in this interview with LBRY's creator, Jeremy Kauffman.

Now I want you to pay attention to how Jeremy advertised LBRY in this particular interview and also the video title:

Decentralized, Open Source YouTube Alternative

Okay. That kind of goes with the explanation from before. A decentralized alternative to YouTube. Let's not focus too much on that particular word that has the same presentation to the vast majority of the population as net neutrality does. You most likely heard a lot about the term being tossed around everywhere in news, article pieces, tweets, etc. but you don't actually know what it means.

Ill leave the explaining to the other hundreds of articles that love to overexplain and go into technical porn about all the "technobabble" surrounding it. Telling you how everything (even when you didn't ask for it in the first place) works makes their pants wet.

Suffice to say, if YouTube goes belly up, for example. It takes everyone with it. Since LBRY is not a single place, if some part of it goes belly up, only the part that went belly up goes away. The rest continues working.

Now that we went into that tangent for no apparent reason other than have myself shamelessly insert a rant, let's continue with my experience about finding LBRY.

When I saw the interview, I was sold on the idea. Not because of the whole "YouTube going dictator" thing that many small creators are having issues with, but more because LBRY looked like a place where I could put things that YouTube didn't allow me to in the first place. Heck, I didn't even pay attention to the whole crypto thing!

Okay, I waited until the closed beta was over, then finally got the chance to test the app in its current open beta stage.

First strange thing I noticed is that LBRY is actually an app you install.

Wait a second. Wasn't this supposed to be an alternative to YouTube? Do you have to install anything to use YouTube. Of course not.

But, I shrugged it off initially. Maybe the app was so good that this would be just a minor thing and the features would overshadow that.

Skipping some time forward, I sort of got along with the app's shortcomings and started putting some content in it, including content that only exists in LBRY and no other place. Life could've been better, but it was what I could have at the point.

Then disaster struck.

As you may know, LBRY is crypto based and uses its own crypto currency, called LBC as the currency you receive and use to pay for things. Think of it as virtual money. That money goes to a folder called "lbryum" in your computer, which is virtual wallet. Much like a real wallet, if you lose it, you lose all the money inside it and whatever else is in it. You're supposed to cherish it and store it as safely as possible. Now, that would be okay, except that's not the only thing this particular wallet does. It also stores data about every channel you created and what videos you uploaded. As you
probably guessed it, if you lose your wallet, not only you lose the virtual coin inside it, you also lose ownership of all the content you put in the platform.

Yes, you lose ownership of the content you put in the platform.

And, you know the best part about it? Nobody tells you that.

And this is where our first brickwall hits you right in the face. The folks at the LBRY project assume that you already know what crypto is and how it works. Something that I only came to find out when I didn't back up my wallet and was suprised to find that I lost everything when I had to reinstall the app due to changing to another operating system.

But the apps tells about it, right? No. There is one option to back the wallet up, but you can't use it when the wallet is empty and it's hidden in a configuration menu you don't have to visit 99.9% of the time.

But that's not the worst part of the experience. At least not for me.

Confused, I went to their Discord server and asked. I'll reduce the arguments I heard from one single sentece from several people at the same time back then:

We never told you to backup your wallet, but you have to. That's the #1 rule of crypto. We can't do anything about it.

This is pretty much like a sittuation that sometimes happens in a few countries, where something is illegal to do, but nobody tells you that it is until you break the law and assumes everyone knows because it is the law and shame on you for not knowing about it.

Now, understand here that the whole point of me mentioning that has nothing to do with virtual money. In many ways, your content is more valuable than any coin, virtual or pshysical. Let's also be clear that not all content creators are tech savy people as well. Let's also not forget that sometimes you have to reinstall stuff.

Now, imagine losing all stuff you spent time and resources to produce because nobody told you about something you should've known since the very beginning.

Let's just say that it took at least 15 minutes of heated discussion for the people from LBRY to sort of understand the importance of that and say they'll put a warning in the future.

And this is one example. I'm not gonna say that every single pain point you bring is treated like that, but you sort of have that feeling that you're not really reaching anyone and that's there's no understanding about why that's something to be concerned.

Now this attitude, coupled with all the marketing material I linked above makes me ask:

Who are the LBRY users?

Made for users, by non-users

I'll say that it doesn't take much time using LBRY for you to see where it falls short. And the places where it falls short are things you would not expect from a project 3 years in the making. For example, there's no easy way to share, manage or even search for content in the app. Almost everything has to be done manually.

It seems strange that a project which touts itself as an alternative to YouTube lacks basic features that YouTube itself had since day one. But it's not weird once you spend some time having conversations about the projects with moderators and developers of it.

To put it simply, it's safe to say that, with exceptions, no person who is part of the development team for the project or contributing actually uses it. And that is confirmed by the fact that the developers and the marketing team seem to have different goals. While the developers want the network infra-structure to be strong and features/functionality that would actually be useful for you and me as end users are put in the backburner, marketing wants as much people joining the service as possible. User rentention is secondary. If we can get the word out, less than half of the users who were sold in the idea is better than no users.

It's safe to say that piloting the ship this way is sinking it slowly.

Now, when you look at, say, YouTube the core features of it are:

• Uploading.
• Sharing.
• Discovery.

With the exception of the latter, YouTube pretty much had all of them since day one.

When you look at LBRY, what are the core features of it? If you ask a developer, they will tell you something. If you ask a person who is marketing it, they'll tell you something else. There seems to be no clear vision nor mission statment, to the point that even finding something even closer to describing what LBRY is in the beggining took some legwork.

As it stands currently, LBRY only serves the following:

• Developers.
• People with interest in crypto who want to add yet another coin to their wallets.
• People that want to make money using LBRY's crypto currency.

As an end user, I hope your tolerance and patience is higher than usual, otherwise, I can see you uploading a couple of videos to LBRY expecting something, finding out you're not gonna get it, then abandoning it. It's not hard to see why that happens. You're not what LBRY is currently looking for.

But, if those are the people that LBRY is looking for, why is it being marketing like that?

I wish I could give you an answer to that, but I have no idea. I mean, if you look at LBRY by how it's being marketed, you'd think it's done and ready to carry you to the promised land. You'll only find how broken it is when it's "too late".

And, if you want to track how LBRY development is going, I hope you understand how GitHub works and how to track progress using it. Shame on you for not being a developer, with your icky soft skills. No dev related stuff on Twitter, no blogs, nothing that would serve people who aren't developers.

What would you change then?

This is something I was asked by one of the community devs (not sure what that even means in practice) once. I'm not gonna deny that my opinions on certain things are often very heated and may lack the necessary candy coating people often want to lick.

Well, one thing I would immediately stop is this notion that this project is a revolutionary idea no one has ever done before and that we're fucking genious that will get the world on our laps for that.

I may be wrong, but this is the impression I have. Video sharing is not new, decentralized services are not new, cryptocurrency is not new...You're just gluing pieces of different wheels together and claiming you reinvented the
wheel. Why is this attitude that this app is best thing since sliced bread even necessary to begin with?

Another thing that myself and several people have asked already and makes no sense is why isn't LBRY a web service? There a lot of problems associated with sharing content in the app that would not even exist in that magnitude if you could easily link your content to someone and didn't even have to mess their hands with installations and multiple tools to even see it.

Oh, you think it's hard to make decentralized services that are web based? Have you ever heard of Mastodon? Without going into much detail, it's a decentralized alternative to Twitter and
as a user, I can guarantee you it does everything Twitter does with pretty much none of the drawbacks. It's not exactly like Twitter, but the core functionality is there.

Other than that, there are small things that should've been implemented before others that I could mention, but it would take too long to list them all in here, but the two I mentioned could use some work.

Now keep in mind that I couldn't write a functioning program to save my life, so I can only relay this to people with those skills instead.

In conclusion

Now, I wouldn't say that I don't believe that LBRY has some potential and the idea can fly well. I mean, why would I even spend time writing this if I didn't in the first place?

LBRY has potential and can work, but I feel their focus is in the wrong place and...without clear indication to where it wants to go, it's also hard to even know how you can help support it, which is not really what you want out of something that's open source. Where's dev material about the project? Where's the roadmap? And if those things exist, why don't we have easy access to it?

But, as the title goes, LBRY is like this because of LBRY itself. Sure, new users are pretty much joining every single day, but how many are staying? Recently, there was a sort of celebration about James Franco joining LBRY but...Will he even stay in long enough to matter? What about the other featured content creators? Are they still there? How can you tell
if they are or not?