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Can someone explain Pipe's LBRY usage to me? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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Soo, I just set up my own Piped instance and noticed that you could disable "LBRY-integration". I did a very quick search and learned that this is some sort of decentralised content sharing thingy. I thought nothing much of it at the time, assumed it was some way to speed up streams or whatever and just went on with my day. I did discover that Odysee was made with that protocol, so I assumed it was just some PeerTube-ish thing.

Until today. I just saw the "LBRY is shutting down"-post on this community. I read it and noticed that LBRY was some kind of web3-nonsense? That got me looking. So the way I understand LBRY, it's basically an Indexer on a Blockchain that points to BitTorrent content which is then served as online media... right? I'm confused.

Now I have two questions:

What and why is LBRY?
How and why is Piped using LBRY?

Hope someone can enlighten me :)

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Was asking the same question when reading about the Odyssey and lbry inc stuff.

In short it seems like decentralized indexer, so Peertube should be able to use it for searching content (I did not verify this).

Longer answer is that classic indexers join content metadata (file name, ...) with the BitTorrent hash, this does the same thing but instead of being a single website this metadata+bt hash is stored in the distributed blockchain (so no singular entity hold this information, censor resistance etc).
The data is still distributed thru BitTorrent so it has all the stuff of that protocol like files going dark when noone is seeding.
E: also uploaders of the content can also set a price for getting the files but I have no idea how they handle people just sharing the torrents (hashses) outside or w/e

My answer is that it's glorified DHT with metadata search.

I found this when searching for some more technical stuff - https://spec.lbry.com/.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

thanks for your detailed answer :) So it's really just another "Solution in search of a problem" kind of deal, since the whole concept "decentralises" a conecpt that is already decentralised (BitTorrent) but with a little Cryptocurrency because of course it has Crypto.

Now I just need to find out what Piped does with it, since all it's content is supposed to be on YouTube, right? So searching for content can't be it's purpose... I think.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Solution in search of a problem

In this case, it can be considered as a solution to actual problem - trackers/indexers going down, or actually a deeper problem of BitTorrent, where you need the centralized trackers/indexers to find the torrent of the content you are looking for (you can't just open qbittorrent and search for Arch Linux ISO).
But the execution of this solution is definitely up for debate.