 Hello. My name is Derek Taylor. I'm the creator of the DistroTube channel on YouTube and Odyssey. And I try to promote myself on both YouTube and Odyssey as equally as possible because I know many people don't want to be on YouTube. They don't want to view my content on YouTube. One of the things about being a video content creator, YouTube is by far the biggest video platform. So if you have a message that you're trying to get out there like I am, I'm trying to spread the message of free and open source software. And I want as many people to hear that message as possible. I need to be on the biggest platform. So I have to be on YouTube. So I put my videos on YouTube. But here's the thing. Once people start hearing that message of free and open source software and they get more concerned about their freedoms and privacy and things like that, all of a sudden some of those people that were watching my videos on YouTube no longer want to be on YouTube. Well, where do they go then? Well, you go to Odyssey. So what is Odyssey? Odyssey.com is very similar to YouTube as far as it's a video platform. Anybody can post their video content to it. You can watch my videos on Odyssey.com. You can comment on the videos. And for the most part, if you're used to how YouTube works, you're going to be just fine on Odyssey. What Odyssey is, it's actually a front end, a website to the library protocol. So the library protocol, it's a blockchain based protocol where you can share content. Really video content, but you can also share articles and text files, things like that. And library is heavily focused on freedom of speech, anti-censorship. And they can be that way because it's just a protocol that it's not like a corporation that's being monetized by an ad network the way YouTube is. YouTube makes billions and billions of dollars on those ads that play on videos, right? They don't pay the creators that much, right? We get just pennies on the dollar for what YouTube actually makes on all those ads that get served on those videos. And when you have these billions of dollars worth of ads playing on these videos on YouTube, obviously some of these companies that make these gigantic ad buys, sometimes they come to YouTube and say, hey, I don't like the kind of content that's on your network. Some of these videos, this topic, this particular creator, hey, I don't want my ads to be served on those videos, this kind of content. If you don't correct this problem, I'm just going to not buy any more ads from you. Sometimes billions of dollars that I spend with you every year, I'm not going to spend that anymore. Well, if you're a YouTube, what do you do? Well, then you start censoring people, right? You start adjusting the rules, this kind of content's no longer allowed. These creators at this particular company that was buying ads, they don't like this creator. Well, I'm going to shut them down. I'm going to delete their channel. And you can kind of understand why YouTube does that, right? Because it affects their wallet, it affects their pocketbook. Library doesn't have these kinds of problems. So whatever you post a library, they don't care as far as political content, whether it's left or right, whether it's some topic that they don't agree with. If you're one of these conspiracy theory nuts, you know, I don't care for conspiracy theory kind of content. I think all of you people that actually are into that are a little weird. But if you wanted to post that kind of ridiculous content, they'll let you, right? More YouTube often has problems with some of this kind of content, right? YouTube doesn't like the flat earthers and things like that. Library, library really wouldn't care. So Odyssey is a web front end to library. Now Odyssey is actually not the library protocol. Odyssey is a company. It's a website and it's US based. They have to abide by US law. So even though it's free speech, anti-censorship, if you do anything that breaks US law, they're going to take you down. Legally, they have to take you down. So you could actually get a DMCA notice on Odyssey. Again, you break US law, they got to take you down, right? They have no choice. And honestly, freedom of speech doesn't really mean you're allowed to break the law. You know, a lot of people have it twisted that, you know, free speech means I can do anything. No, no, no, that's not exactly what free speech means. It means you can do things to a certain limit. Many people don't understand. Yes, freedom of speech, the freedom to do anything. Yes, you're free to do what you want, but you also have to understand with all of your actions in life, you have to accept the consequences, right? So anything you post that breaks US law on Odyssey.com is going to get you in trouble. So why do I post all of my videos, both to YouTube and Odyssey? I already mentioned, well, mainly because some people don't want to be on YouTube. They would prefer to watch me on Odyssey. So it's nice to be on both platforms for that reason. But the other reason I'm on both platforms is kind of a safety net. It's kind of like a hedge, right? If YouTube ever goes away for whatever reason, then I'm on Odyssey, right? If I you don't want to have all of your eggs in one basket. Let me switch back over to my desktop. And one of the things about YouTube is YouTube. I won't say YouTube is just going to disappear one day, but it could. But the real thing with YouTube that is a very real threat to every creator on the platform is sometimes YouTube fans, people, they just delete entire channels. And oftentimes they delete channels for absolutely no reason. For example, anybody that's watched any of my content, I am about as family friendly as you can get. I don't typically curse on my videos, even in real life. What you see on video is really me. I don't like to swear in real life. I don't swear on video. Most of my videos, of course, are Linux related, you know, nerdy stuff, bash scripting and things like that. Right. This really benign stuff that really should never violate any kind of code of conduct or anything like that. That being said, many times over the years, I have actually had videos of mine demonetized by YouTube. For no reason. I've never had a video of mine demonetized that actually was demonetized for a legit reason, because typically they'll demonetize a video for violating their terms of service. So usually you're doing something scandalous in the video, something they disagree with certain kinds of topics they don't want you to discuss. Maybe you're cursing a lot. Maybe it's violent content or racy kind of content. Yeah, stuff I have never done on any of my videos, right? But I often some of the videos that I get demonetized for are really like boring stuff. I had a video a couple of years back that was demonetized. It was a Qtile video where I was talking about the Qtile window manager and I was showing you how to config it, right? The config is written in Python. I'm just showing you a little Python, nothing out of the ordinary with that video at all. It was demonetized and it stayed demonetized for like well over years, like two years. And this video had a ton of views on it. I never got paid anything for that video because all the ads there was it was still playing ads on that video. I never received a dime for it because I had been demonetized because apparently I did something really bad on that video. There was nothing wrong with this video. The problem with YouTube is they have AI, machine learning. They have these bots that go out there and scan these videos. Humans can't possibly review all the content on YouTube. I get that. So sometimes the algorithms, they have these false flags. I would say nine times out of 10, probably the videos that get flagged on YouTube haven't done anything. It's just the fact that they're using these bots to do all of this to demonetize people, to ban people. You're going to have a whole lot of false positives. And there is a system where when you get demonetized or you get a strike or you get man, you should have at least one appeal. And I I appealed this video that was demonetized for absolutely no reason. The appeal states that a human will actually go and review that video. Well, when I appealed, I got an almost immediate response way too quick for anybody to watch that video. And typically, you know how big YouTube is. You know, I would think it would take at least 24 to 48 hours, maybe before anybody would ever even get a chance to read my email. But I get an immediate response saying that they took a look at my video and it still broke the terms of service and they won't tell me what I broke. They never tell you the rule you broke. They just say, hey, we reviewed it and yes, you violated the terms of service. Your video is still demonetized. There's no way, no way a human being ever looked at that video. And after that, I have no other way to contact YouTube. No one's ever going to take a look at that again. That's done. That video is demonetized for no reason. And there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. Another interesting thing that YouTube sometimes does is they age restrict videos and I've had this happen to two or three of my videos where they receive an age restriction where minors can't watch my video. Have I ever made a video that was something that a minor should not take a look at? No, there's never been a video I've ever posted that should be age restricted. But some of the videos I mean, I'm not talking about really benign stuff, distro reviews, the terminal command tutorial, like type videos, right? They're age restricted for no reason, again, because I bought for whatever reason, falsely flagged it for some reason. You appeal it. The appeal never works. It comes back. They say a human reviewed it. You know a human being never reviewed it because there's no way a human would ever look at any of my videos and say there should be for 18 years or older. One of the real concerns with YouTube is sometimes they country restrict your videos because certain countries in the world, they have censorship, like major censorship. They don't want certain YouTube videos to be shown to their people, to their citizens, right? Because they're trying to limit the truth and Google and YouTube. Unfortunately, they actually acquiesce to some of these totalitarian regimes that are trying to censor their own people. So depending on what part of the world you're in, you're going to have access to some YouTube videos and not others. When the war in the Ukraine started and they banned a couple of large Russian YouTube channels, YouTube did because obviously they're Russian channels. They're coming at it from a Russian perspective where Russia is the good guy, you know, and you can't have that. You have to come at it from the Ukrainian point of view or from the rest of the world point of view, especially the West, right? Because the West is anti Russia in this case, as far as that conflict. And we're just going to ban these channels because they're putting a different spin on things. And I'm not saying I don't want to get into the Russia Ukraine situation as far as, you know, taking sides or is one side right and wrong. That's not the case. But here's the thing. If you start when you start just banning certain channels or certain groups of channels, because they have a different take on things, then maybe what you agree with, that's dangerous. And when I say that any channel can be deleted at any time for no reason, it happens all the time. We had a situation not too long ago was three or four months back. The Linux experiment, a very big Linux channel, not controversial at all. You know, he typically doesn't stray in it into any weird spaces, right? Mainly just talking about tech, very benign content, right? And his channel was deleted permanently deleted because he supposedly broke some kind of YouTube terms of service. And he eventually got his channel back. He appealed a lot of people in the community were in an uproar because he has a big channel. He can actually create a little bit more of an uproar on social media and actually get somebody out like a real person at YouTube to actually take a look at his case where smaller channels have absolutely no chance of that happening. So really, that's kind of why I am on odyssey.com. Again, if you want to watch my videos on YouTube, I love my YouTube audience. Obviously, I make money from YouTube. I have ads that run on YouTube and it is what I use to earn a living. Those of you that watch my content on Odyssey, those of you that want to support me by donating LBC library credits to me, that's fine. Right now, the prices of crypto are very depressed, right? The crypto is almost worthless. But if you want to donate some LBC to me, that's fine. Those of you that want to support me through other ways on Odyssey, for example, since I really don't get paid for you guys watching anything on Odyssey. If you wanted to support me by making a donation through PayPal or subscribing through Patreon, I would love that as well. One of the things about Odyssey, if you haven't checked it out in the last few months, Odyssey has gotten so much better. Odyssey, again, if you're comfortable using YouTube, you'll be comfortable with Odyssey. For example, if I click on my latest video, I'm going to pause it though, so it doesn't play it. But playback is great. The buffering, you know, we used to have some buffering issues in the early days about three years ago when library was first getting started in the early days of Odyssey. Sometimes playback was stuttery. Sometimes videos would buffer. It doesn't happen. Not like it did back in the day. Now, the playback on Odyssey is actually very smooth, scrolling through the video, scrubbing through the video. I actually get a little preview, right? I much like you do on YouTube. So as far as somebody that just consumes content, you're going to be right at home. Those of you that love social aspects of video content, like you comment all the time on YouTube, you can comment on Odyssey. The comment system works exactly the same. Now, for those of you that are creators, you could actually sync your content from YouTube to Odyssey. I think you have to have at least 300 subscribers. You sign up and automatically, Odyssey will pull down your YouTube content to Odyssey. And every time you post to YouTube, they will sync your new videos automatically. You don't have to do anything. There's absolutely no work involved. If you want to sync your YouTube channel to Odyssey and in the early days of Odyssey, when I first joined, it was it was a little clunky being a creator because back then you really didn't have comments. And when they first introduced comments, you couldn't moderate the comments. Now I have total control on all the comments on all of my videos, meaning if somebody posts something ridiculous, something racist or hateful or somebody threatens somebody, you know, the kinds of comments that are completely inappropriate and should never be tolerated. I now have the ability to delete those. In the early days, we didn't have that ability, but they've now added that functionality. We do have some analytics over on Odyssey. We also have a light mode and a dark mode. We also have a notification system. And the notification system is actually pretty good. Odyssey has a mobile app. The mobile app I've got on my Android phone. It works just fine. I also use the library app, the LBRY app. The library has a desktop app that runs on Linux. I use that. One interesting thing is that your browsers, there's Odyssey plugins for your browsers. I'm in the Brave browser today. And one of the cool things I can enable in the Brave browser, I can go to the Chrome store and I can look for a plugin called Watch It on Odyssey. And if you install that plugin on Chrome or Firefox or any Chrome or Firefox based browser, the Watch on Odyssey plugin, any time I click on a video, for example, this last video I posted, I click on it on YouTube. Right now I'm on YouTube. I'm going to click on this video, watch what happens. It actually redirects it to Odyssey.com, right? If my video, it checks if my video is available on Odyssey and if it is, it redirects me to Watch It on Odyssey. So that is a great plugin because many people, you're probably not going to go to YouTube specifically for that, but many people, I often post my YouTube video links on social media, on Mastodon, Reddit, things like that. And I always post the YouTube link because typically I post on YouTube first and then it syncs to Odyssey. So I never have an Odyssey link to post to social media right away. It takes sometimes 30 minutes to an hour before I have the Odyssey video up. And people naturally complain, hey, why do you only post the YouTube link? Why don't you post the Odyssey link? Guys, get this plugin, Watch on Odyssey. And now any time I post a YouTube link on my Mastodon or on Reddit, if you click on the YouTube link, it'll just redirect you to Odyssey to the video on Odyssey if it's available. And of course, if it's not available, then you just get the YouTube link. Recently, Odyssey has added the ability to live stream from Odyssey. And now I have never tried this out mainly because I don't live stream much. Even on YouTube, I don't do much live streaming because of internet issues. Typically, I do one live stream a month with my patrons and half of the time, those things are kind of train wreck. So I really don't like live streaming. But for those of you that needed that functionality, Odyssey now has it. And what I'm told is it's pretty good. And in the early days, it was a beta where live streaming was only available to some of the biggest creators on Odyssey, like me. I'm actually one of the bigger channels over on the platform. But now they've recently opened up live streaming to anybody on the platform. Now, one of the reasons I'm making today's video to spotlight Odyssey and to tell you guys how great Odyssey is, is because I've been worried here in the past few months because Odyssey, its popularity seems to be waning a little bit, which is kind of weird because when Odyssey and library first exploded on the scene, everybody started moving to Odyssey. A lot of creators, all your tech creators, Linux creators, all the crypto channels of course had no choice because YouTube was banning them. But you saw a lot of creators moving to Odyssey very quickly in the early days. And I would say after about two years, you really started seeing all the big creators and some of the biggest names on YouTube, some of the biggest creators, a lot of you guys watch, have Odyssey channels. And many of those channels were actually promoting their Odyssey channels, even posting on YouTube. They would say, hey, I'm also on Odyssey. Check me out on Odyssey. Donate some LBCs to me because you could get paid on Odyssey by people watching your content and donating those library credits, those LBCs, which were worth something back when crypto was worth something. As a matter of fact, the first year when I first signed up to Odyssey.com was the year that I started doing YouTube full time because the lockdown, the pandemic, this just became my full time job and I was posting both YouTube and to Odyssey. And that that first year, 2020, I want to say I probably made $7,000 worth of LBCs that year through Odyssey.com. As far as people donating, not life changing amount of money, $7,000 US definitely couldn't live on it because it would pay a few bills. I'm just talking about for an entire year. But it was something, right? It was certainly worth it as far as an extra few thousand dollars a year. And it certainly made the difference, especially that first year, the pandemic year, where, you know, I would have struggled a little bit getting by had it not been for Odyssey. But obviously crypto prices have started to crash, right? And especially here in the last six months, crypto is practically worthless, right? Bitcoin and ether and all of this stuff is just not worth anything. And of course, library credits. Last time I checked what an LBC was worth. It was like worth, I don't know, a penny. I haven't checked it recently. Y'all got LBC was worth one cent. Where back in the heyday when the crypto prices were sky high, I remember library credits at one time were worth nearly 40 cents a credit, right? So a major difference. And that's part of probably why a lot of creators have just forgot about Odyssey because it's no longer worth their time, right? Because I can't get paid anything. I'm going to get all of these LBC credits, but they're practically worthless now, right? It would take a bajillion of them for me to even make enough to where, you know, I could like pay my car note or something. And I think that's unfortunate because markets go up and down. The crypto prices will eventually return. Of course, when they return, a lot of these creators that kind of swore off Odyssey, they'll return to. And I think that's unfortunate. I think you got to take these things with the punches. You just got to roll with the punches, right? And, you know, I'm not worried about the price of LBC on Odyssey. And many people, you should probably monetize your content in multiple ways. That's why I tell people about Patreon and PayPal and things like that. If you want to actually donate real money to me, right? US dollars, you know, I'd appreciate that as well. I think another reason why a lot of creators have kind of shied away from Odyssey here recently is because a few months back, the SEC, which is the Security and Exchange Commission here in the US actually sued Library, the Library Company behind the Library Protocol. It's not Odyssey, Odyssey is a different thing, but they sued Library, the Library team. And they sued them for selling unregistered digital asset currencies. So, you know, selling money, right? The money that you didn't register with the SEC first, which is illegal. And the Library Corporation, they're fighting the lawsuit. It'll eventually go to court. It may get settled at some point. I don't know. Are they going to actually win? Probably not. The SEC is a very powerful government organization. Typically, when they go after somebody, they always win. And of course, that has a lot of people concerned. It doesn't have me concerned because I don't think libraries going away, no matter what happens with that lawsuit. And Odyssey.com is not library. Odyssey, again, is a front-end to the Library Protocol. The website, Odyssey.com, has absolutely nothing to do with that lawsuit. So really, I just wanted to remind people that Odyssey.com is a great platform. And I still think it is by far the best alternative to YouTube out there. I'm not saying it's as good as YouTube, feature-rich as YouTube, but there's not really any good YouTube alternatives out there. There's a whole bunch of alternative video platforms. Most of them are straight garbage. Odyssey.com is the exception. And if you enjoy watching my videos on YouTube, keep watching them on YouTube. If you're looking for a different platform to consume my content, check out Odyssey.com. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Dustin Gabe James Matt, Maxim Mimit, Michael Mitchell, Paul West. Why are you ballin' homey? Ellen Armor Dragon, Chuck Commander, Rainier Redi, Yo-Kai Dillon, Greg Marsh from Erion, Alexander Paul, Peace, Archon, Fedora, Polytech, Realitech, Realitech, Forlustrade, Private Steven, Touls Devler, and Willie. These guys. They're my highest-tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode would not have been possible. The show's also brought to you by each and everyone of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors and LBC credits are practically worthless right now if you want to support my work. You want to see more videos about Linux and Freed Open Source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys. And yes, they have funny cat videos on Odyssey.