@berkberkman I remember the early, pre-Odysee days of LBRY when they were stroking themselves over how open-source and decentralized they were. I found their repo, as you did, but I struggled to find any comprehensible guides or instructions on how to host LBRY servers/instances. This contrasted sharply with a project like PeerTube, where information on how to install/host is central to the entire idea, and is thus placed front and center.
I did later find the repo for "spee.ch", which claims to be a "user-friendly, custom-designed, image and video hosting site backed by the LBRY blockchain", but the code is already 4 or 5 years dormant, and the repo states that's been replaced by "lbry.tv" (which now redirects to the Odysee front page):
https://github.com/lbryio/spee.ch
Further to that, odysee-frontend has a repo but it doesn't really provide a lot of helpful information for spinning up instances, so it isn't very helpful to anybody who isn't already very experienced:
https://github.com/OdyseeTeam/odysee-frontend
I understood that LBRY-the-protocol was basically just address space, and arguably that's decentralized to a degree. But an addressing system pointing to files hosted on otherwise centralized storage servers seemed like half a solution at best. Instructions on how to spin up LBRY content hosting servers needed to be easier to find, use, and understand if the core idea was going to get off the ground, I figured. I tried bringing this up with what LBRY people I could get the ears of, but no satisfactory responses came back.
I was told that the LBRY Desktop app would fix this, since users could host their own content via that... which was also less than helpful, because using a home desktop or other personal device is a shitty alternative to a dedicated server or VPS, for obvious reasons.
My impression was that they built LBRY-the-protocol in order to slap the "open source, web3, decentralized, freedom tech" label on themselves, and then slowly pivoted into building Odysee on top of it... almost like they Embrace/Extend/Extinguished their own project to bootstrap their new (centralized) video hosting platform.
At this stage, I'm not clear if LBRY getting sunk was part of the plan or just everything going tits up beyond their ability to control. Odysee Inc appears to be an asset of LBRY Inc, which means it's going to be sold to settle their SEC debt. Who'll take it over and what they'll do with it is an open question right now, but I expect it'll get snapped up by some bullshit VC outfit and steer nose-first into the ground. But I'm a notorious pessimist.