The New Oil

In keeping with my pledge to post major updates on the blog, I should let you all know that recently, The New Oil fully deleted our Odysee channel. For those who care, let me explain why. This won’t take long.

The primary driving factor for deleting Odysee was that they disabled YouTube Sync. This has been an on-and-off problem for PeerTube instances everywhere. I’m not really sure what the issue is here. My own instance has fallen prey to this before. The running theory is that sometimes certain instances attract Google’s attention as drawing a lot of traffic or being from a data center and they block it. I’m not sure if that’s the case, and if so I’m not sure why my instances seem to randomly unblock. Who knows. Regardless, it seems like the cat-and-mouse has simply become too much for the Odysee team and they’ve thrown in the towel. They now recommend all creators upload manually.

Here’s the thing though: I despise Odysee. I’ve made no secret of this. So basically my options have become “manually log in to Odysee and upload/manage content,” “let it just sit there without getting updates,” or “delete the channel.” Given my intense disdain for the platform, I absolutely wasn’t about to waste a second of my life doing the first option. So I put it up to a vote on my personal Mastodon account, and the overwhelming majority said to junk it.

So here we are. Goodbye Odysee. Good riddance.

“But Nate!” The Odysee fans will say, “what about decentralization? And privacy? And data sovereignty? And all that stuff!” Allow me to introduce you to PeerTube. We’ve had one for years. It’s truly decentralized because anyone can spin up a server rather than LBRY, which appears to really only have one (or two) clients and you can only cash out coins in a few sketchy exchanges. I'm also a little unclear how one would truly make it their own. How can you spin up new servers? Or clients? Is it their own blockchain or an existing one? How do you even delete content on the blockchain? What about “right to be forgotten”? I digress. You’re locked in on Odysee. PeerTube is also private because we host all the data, and unlike Odysee, there’s no third-party trackers or scripts, even on videos imported from YouTube (I make this claim by examining uBlock Origin on both sites). And finally, PeerTube is truly data sovereign because – like most federated platforms built on Activity Pub – you can export your data and take it to another instance or even follow PeerTube from another account elsewhere on the Fediverse, like Mastodon or PixelFed. PeerTube is truly the superior option (except arguably the UI, I’ll give Odysee that one). And as an added bonus, PeerTube doesn’t try to trick you into thinking that you’re making money cause of shitcoin integration. You just tell your viewers where to support you and they can go do it in whatever format you prefer.

So in conclusion, long story short: I’m glad to be gone. I will not sign up back up. Or to Rumble. Or Bitchute. Or Minds. Or whatever other alt-right haven pops up next. We can be found on YouTube or PeerTube. End of story. If PeerTube isn’t private, decentralized, and data-sovereignish enough for you, then I’m sorry. We’re not the channel for you. Thanks for reading.

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