 Today, we need to talk about a very serious problem. I think it's one of the most serious problems that kind of flies under the radar because I love being a video content creator. This is what I enjoy doing. It allows me to do what I really want to do in life, which is to teach people, right? To educate people about Linux and free and open source software. I can't imagine me not doing this job. I love being a video content creator. And one of the things about people that consume this kind of content, video content, is you guys, you guys that spend all your time on YouTube watching videos, you guys know the benefits of consuming that content, right? You guys glean a lot of benefits, learn a lot of things from that content. But how many of you really have taken the time to realize the threat that is the YouTube monopoly? Because by YouTube really dominating video content creation as a platform, it really puts not only us, the video content creators at risk, it really puts you, the video content consumer at risk as well. For those of you that don't create video content, I can tell you that YouTube, the reason YouTube is the platform everybody has to be on, is because YouTube has the most viewers, YouTube has an ad network that actually generates money. People can put videos on YouTube and actually earn some decent money, you get enough views, you may even earn a rather decent living from YouTube. You can't really do that on any other video platform, at least not at the moment. And this is what really needs to change. Right now, everybody that wants to actually do video content as a job, they have to be on YouTube. And that is a scary place to be because YouTube, of course, is run by a corporation, Google, and they can just cancel anybody at any time. You can get canceled, silenced, disappeared and you have no legal recourse because when you sign up for YouTube, you give YouTube all rights to do whatever the hell they want to with your videos, with your channel. They can get rid of you at any time. They don't have to give you a reason why they got rid of your videos or why they just canceled your account entirely. And there's really nothing you can do about it. So if you have all of your eggs in the YouTube basket, like that is your only source of income, that is a very dangerous place to be. And of course, you guys that watch YouTube videos all the time, you guys follow a bunch of channels, you guys notice that sometimes your favorite channels disappear. Sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. And what really sparked me making this video today was I was noticing that mental outlaw had not posted in almost two weeks. Now he is a very active YouTuber, focuses a lot on free software. He also does a lot with privacy and security related topics. And it's unusual for someone that posts practically every single day to go two weeks without posting. Right? Well, the reason he hasn't posted is because YouTube gave him a temporary ban. He's not allowed to post. And apparently the reason he was not allowed to post is because they gave him a strike on a couple of his earlier videos, some of them about torrenting tools, not about torrenting illegal content, just talking in general about torrenting and some other various tools that maybe circumvent DRM in certain cases and things like that. And of course, YouTube, they have problems with that sort of content, even though it's not necessarily strictly against their terms of service. They often strike videos that contain that content. And in this case, they actually gave the channel a strike and gave him a restriction on actually being able to upload. I think his restriction though is only for a couple of weeks. I think he will be back posting here in just a few more days. But this is another situation where someone was given a strike or given a ban for what I consider no real reason, because again, nothing he did was strictly against terms of service. And there's so much garbage on YouTube. But there are things on YouTube that are absolutely shocking. Like I see people that are exploiting young children. Those channels are fine. I see channels that promote eating disorders like bulimia. Those channels are fine. Like those are real dangers. Those are harmful content that absolutely don't belong on the YouTube platform. But that's okay. But telling somebody how to torrent a Linux ISO gets you striked. Another one that happened recently, you guys remember, this was a few months back, the Linux experiment had his channel completely deleted, permanently deleted because he did violate the terms of service. I'll give YouTube a little credit here. He was running a giveaway, a product giveaway, which there are lottery laws and gambling laws in many parts of the world, including the U.S., where of course Google and YouTube are based out of, but many, many tech channels do product giveaways. There are certain rules you have to follow and what he was doing really didn't seem that different than doing the same thing that every other tech channel does. But for some reason, they permanently deleted his channel. He appealed and a lot of people got on his side and appealed to YouTube to actually let the dude have his channel back and they did reverse that decision. But that was a very scary situation because again, they removed all of his content and just canceled his account. And if they had decided that his appeal was rejected, he just wouldn't be on YouTube anymore. All of his content would no longer exist unless he had that content somewhere else on the internet. Another Linux YouTuber that gets strikes all the time, Luke Smith. Now, Luke Smith does play around with some topics that he probably shouldn't because they do, again, but I'll give YouTube a little credit, violate some terms of service. But it seems like every time Luke posts something, you know, he's facing another two week ban or month long ban. That's why he disappears for long stretches at a time. And it's one of those things. A lot of times when he gets banned is for videos way in the past. And that was the case with mental outlaw, too. The video that caused him to get this temporary restriction where he can't post was a video he did way back and YouTube has algorithms, right? So they know what the content of that video was or they knew what the content of the video was when he posted it and it was OK. But now all of a sudden it's not. And that leads you to believe that there's some strange things going on on the back end like YouTube that they don't apply rules fairly to everyone. And this is a touchy situation. Now, YouTube is their house, their rules. They can do whatever the hell they want. This isn't a public space, right? So YouTube is free to just ban people like I get it. And I'll defend YouTube's right on that. But we, the video content creators, you know, all the millions and millions. There's like tens of millions of channels on YouTube. We need to be better at fighting against this kind of thing. We need to actually organize. We need to actually create competition for YouTube. And we're just giving YouTube all the power and YouTube is doing nothing. I mean, they pay for all the servers. I mean, obviously, YouTube spends a lot of money to host the video platform. But who's making all the content? We are. And we're giving up all of our power to Google just for providing servers for us to upload to. And I don't think that is the correct way to go about this thing. I really don't like how all the top channels, like if you go to YouTube's homepage, you're getting served video recommendations for really big music channels, especially movie channels, especially they're no longer community channels made by just normal folks like you and me, right? It's almost it's like standard network TV or cable TV, right? They're just giving me that same garbage. If I wanted to watch that garbage, I turn on my TV. I don't even own a TV because I don't want to watch that stuff. But now I get served that same stuff on YouTube or maybe I just want to watch normal people talk about whatever the hell's on their mind. But you don't get recommended that stuff anymore, right? I get recommended music videos and the music videos are insane. I get recommended music videos, you know, these female rappers that are rapping about how wet their poonanernaner is. But that apparently does not violate YouTube's terms of service, right? But talking about how to torrent a Linux ISO, that violates their terms of service. I don't get it. It makes no sense. But of course, those big music channels get hundreds of millions, actually billions of views every month on YouTube. They make a ton of money off of having those music channels on the platform. So they can't really be hard on those, right? But again, we don't apply our rules evenly to everybody. The smaller channels, well, you know what? We hold you to a different standard than, you know, the big music companies, the big movie companies. So what is the alternative to YouTube? Well, there are a ton of alternative video platforms out there. And I've looked at all of them at one time or another because people tell me, hey, go take a look at this. And usually I take a look at them for about two minutes and realize their garbage. There's video platforms out there. Many of them have the idea of being completely free as open, free speech, you know, no regulation, no moderation at all. And typically those platforms get overrun by the worst of the worst. And I'm not going to name some of the video platforms out there that are like that. But there are some that I wouldn't be caught dead on. I would never actively post my own videos there. People are free to post my videos there because my videos are creative comments. Anybody can post my videos on any platform. They won't go for it. But I'm not going to do that myself. And I'm certainly not going to recommend my viewers go to some of those platforms and have to deal with some of the hateful and just crazy garbage that are in the comment sections, especially on those platforms. But there is one alternative platform that I came across about two and a half years ago and immediately thought that has potential. I signed up and I've promoted it heavily. I haven't talked about it in a while, but Odyssey, I really think Odyssey is a strong competitor to YouTube. And I've seen massive improvements in Odyssey in the last two and a half years. When I first signed up, Odyssey, you couldn't comment on videos. This website, Odyssey.com actually didn't exist back then. It was library.tv because Odyssey.com. This website here is actually a front end to the LBRY, the library protocol. And it's blockchain based. They have their own cryptocurrency called library credits. And what you do is you sign up for an account and you have to buy a little bit of library credits just to get started. And then what you can do is you can go watch your favorite content creators over on Odyssey. Maybe you want to watch this latest video from this DistroTube guide and you click on it. You can watch this video, right? And you can like, you can dislike, you can comment. And what you can do is you can also give me some LBRY credits, some library credits. So they call it LBC for short. You'll have a little donate button here. You can see it looks like I've generated 115 LBCs on this video. But you can donate, you know, a couple of LBCs to me. They're not worth much right now. The price of LBC is around, I think, three and a half cents or so. But, you know, it allows you guys to directly support your creators. There's no ad network on Odyssey, and that is a limitation. But I do find that you're rewarded by your viewers. I find that model really appealing because the people that love your content, they'll donate, they'll give money to you. They'll support you. I know that because you guys help support me. I couldn't do what I do without you guys, your donations from Patreon, from PayPal and from LBC credits on library. I've made a not an insignificant amount of money from library in the last two and a half years. Now, most of that was in the very first year I signed up when cryptocurrency prices, Bitcoin and LBC prices were much, much higher. LBC prices were worth 10 times what they are right now, you know, a couple of years ago. So unfortunately, I don't make any money on library right now. You know, just pennies, right? It's not, it's not something I could just put my content strictly on Odyssey right now and make a living and get by and just say, you know what? Screw YouTube. I'm not going to post there anymore. I have to be on YouTube. But of course, that's just because of the fluctuating price of cryptocurrency. Now, just because cryptocurrency, the price is deflated right now. That's going to go back up. And when it does, I'll still have all of my LBCs that I didn't cash out when they were worthless and then I'll cash them out and hopefully they'll be worth, you know, they'll be worth a few thousand dollars and that'll be OK. Even though it's not life changing money, it's not money that's necessarily I can depend on solely for my own source of income. It's definitely it definitely helps and also provides a place where me as a content creator, for some reason, I can't post on YouTube because they basically restricted me or maybe they kicked me off the platform entirely. My content is somewhere else and people can go and find me. They don't have to ask, hey, what happened to mental outlaw or Linux experiment? And that was one of the things when those guys facing their bands is they're both on Odyssey. So, you know, you could actually go and get a video from them and they can actually tell you what happened when they're not currently on YouTube. That way, you're not wondering because people naturally are invested in their favorite content creators. I can tell you when I don't post for a few days because I'm one of these really active people, I post almost every day, every other day. If I go more than three days without posting, something has happened. I can just go ahead and tell you that. That's usually that's only happened to me three or four times in the history of my channel where I went more than about three days without posting and every single time was the result of a natural disaster. Two hurricanes and a severe winter ice storm that caused me to miss like a week or a little more than a week of posting at a time, you know, on three different occasions and people knew something was up because, you know, DT he just doesn't all of a sudden stop posting, right? Something's wrong and Odyssey gives you a place where if the reason you're not posting because of YouTube restrictions, you know, you can at least go post on Odyssey to let your viewers know what's up to know that you're not severely ill or that you haven't passed away because that's immediately what most people tend to go to. They tend to go to the really bad stuff, right? Something must have happened and at least you can leave those fears. Now, I mentioned that Odyssey has grown tremendously in the last two and a half years. When I signed up, it was very, very early days. There weren't that many people on the platform and you can see, I've got, you know, 42,000 followers on Odyssey. That is an enormous number, right? For an alternative video platform and people actually watch my videos. I mean, the last video I made yesterday, you know, got 1100 views. That's not great, right? That's a fraction of the views I got on YouTube. That's probably 5% of the views on that video that I got on YouTube. But still, 5% of the views I got on YouTube for an alternative platform. That's actually not bad because there's many video platforms I could post that video to that would never see any views. And when I clicked on that video, you saw that people donated 115 LBC to help me out on that video. Now at three and a half cents, you know, I made about four bucks for people on that video. That's not great money, right? You know, I'm going to make a lot more money on that video but it's posted on YouTube because of the AdSense revenue. But still, four bucks, I'll take it, right? That's something, you know, there's many video platforms you're not going to make anything post in your videos to. When I signed up two and a half years ago, the only channels on Odyssey were crypto channels and Linux free and open source software channels. And the reason for that is the crypto channels all got banned from YouTube. YouTube one day woke up and said, we hate crypto because everything about crypto is a scam. We're going to ban everybody that does crypto on YouTube. So they had to go somewhere and Odyssey was, I guess, the place where they chose to go because it's blockchain based and has its own crypto. So it made sense. Well, we'll all go to Odyssey, right? And the free and open source channels like me in the early days, you saw Lunduk promoted Odyssey heavily. He's not on here anymore. He left because of ideological reasons. I know Gardner Bryant's on here, Brody Robertson's on here. Many, many of the free and open source Linux channels that you guys watch on YouTube are probably here. And the reason those channels are here, of course, is because Odyssey and the library protocol is all free and open source software. So it makes sense to be on a free and open source platform, right? We have to post to YouTube because if you want to spread a message of free and open source software, you want to spread it to the people that have never heard the message and that are on the proprietary platforms, right? So if I want to change hearts and minds, I need to tell people on YouTube about free software. But at the same time, once I've converted some of those people over to free software, it'd be nice if there was a free software platform that they could actually watch my content on. And that's Odyssey. And for those of you that haven't heard of Odyssey, I should explain exactly how big Odyssey has gotten here in the last couple of years. And if I go to this website, Librarynomix, that has some information about the number of channels and the views and things like that, it gives you analytics, some statistics about the entire platform, the number of channels. And if I look at the current value, I guess it's the total number of channels. One million three hundred fifty three thousand three hundred ninety one channels as of when this last graph was taken, you can see the growth. One point three million channels. That is not an insignificant number of channels, right? For an alternative video platform to YouTube. That's crazy. And if I go to the top channels, this is like the top 100 or 200 channels on the platform. If I just take a look at, you know, the top 20 or 30 channels here, you will see names of stuff. Now, the first few mainly are Odyssey library related channels. But then you get to channels that you guys know on YouTube, big channels like Veritasium and Minute Physics is here. Jordan Peterson, Sticks Hexenhammer, Naomi Brockwell. I scrolled down a little further. You see that distro tube guy here again. So you got a lot of creators that you're probably following on YouTube on this platform, on the Odyssey platform. Now, for some reason, we're still not getting the kind of traction with Odyssey that I think it deserves. I mean, obviously it's exploding in popularity. I showed you some of the graphs. This is the alternative to YouTube, but it still still pills in comparison to YouTube right as far as channels and views and the people that are consuming content is because we haven't pushed it enough. Right. It's still this nerdy thing that the only people that are there or the people that are either disgruntled with YouTube or the free software champions like myself, right? We need to push more people to actually use this platform. If you're a video content creator, you have absolutely no excuse not to be posting your videos to Odyssey. And the reason I say that is because it requires absolutely no work on your part. I don't do anything to have my videos posted on Odyssey. I went to the Odyssey page on the Odyssey dot com page and I told it to sync my YouTube channel to Odyssey. That's it. When I post to YouTube, Odyssey knows about it. They they grab that video and they automatically upload it. I don't have to do that. I don't have to sit there and wait for another video to upload because those up like upload times take a long time. You know, it's a pain like if I had to do what I do on YouTube in multiple different places, you know, it's a lot of work. It's time consuming. Odyssey makes it easy. Just go sign up. Tell it you want to sync to your channel and it's done. And you'll make money because people are going to donate LBCs to you. It makes no sense. Like no one has any excuse not to have their channel sync to Odyssey. And I see way too many of us that complain about YouTube, including me. But you guys in the comments, so many YouTube channels complain about it. Most YouTube creators have serious problems with YouTube. I can tell you that from talking to a bunch of YouTube creators because they interact with with you guys that also make video content. We've all had problems dealing with YouTube. But what are we doing about it? Well, what I suggest is even though Odyssey is exploding in popularity, it's doing fine. We need to do better getting the community involved. I'm talking about you guys that consume the content because you guys are the ones that can make a difference. Many YouTube content creators have still never heard of Odyssey. They don't know it exists. If you are watching this video right now, what I want you to do is go check out some of your favorite content creators. See if they also have a channel sync to Odyssey. If they don't, let them know. And if it's a big channel, of course, your comments could get missed. So what I would suggest is take the time to find a few content creators that you interact with that you actually can have some direct line of conversation with, because you interact with them. They typically respond to you on Twitter or, you know, Mastodon, whatever social media Reddit, maybe you're in their discord. Maybe they have a web form, you know, maybe you are subscribed to their Patreon and let these content creators know about Odyssey. Hey, have you heard about it? You know, point them to this video. Let them know that they can sync their channel with no work. Nothing. There's no work involved at all. And they will automatically have their content mirrored somewhere else that's not YouTube. And they may want that simply for the fact that if something happened to YouTube, if YouTube just blew up one day and didn't exist, where's all their content? Well, if they had their content synced to Odyssey, well, when YouTube dies, well, all their content, all their videos are still on Odyssey. I think most content creators would sign up simply for the fact that they would have a backup of their videos. But again, it eventually could prove to be the place where it's the de facto video platform at some point. I could envision a world where that's the case. That's not farfetched because of the way YouTube is going. YouTube is actively pushing people away from its platform. I see that there are video content creators that make a lot of money on YouTube that hate the platform, right? And we just need something else that would provide us an opportunity to make the same kind of money that we can make on YouTube. Odyssey is not quite there yet. But again, there's not that many people on it, even though it's exploded in popularity, I think it's easily the best alternative platform for YouTube. It definitely stands out from the others. We just need you guys, the community. I'm again, I'm asking you, go check out some of your favorite content creators and just search for them on Odyssey. If they're not there, go let them know about Odyssey.com. Now, before I go, I want to thank a few special people. I want to thank the producers of this episode. Devin, Gabe, James, Maxim, Matt, Michael, Mitchell, Paul, Scott, Wes, Alan, Armour, Dragon, Chuck, Commander, Angry, Diochai, Dylan, George, Lee, Lennox, Ninja, Mike, Erion, Alexander, Peace, Arch, and Medor, Polytech, Red Prophet, Stephen and Willie. These guys are my host, tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because these guys allow me to do what I do if you like my work and want to see more videos about Lennox free and open source software. Subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace. Chris Titus is on Odyssey. Tech Hut is on Odyssey. Tech Lore is on Odyssey.