The developer of Librarian brought up some issues a while ago in their blog.
On top of these problems, I wonder if there is really any privacy benefit to using LBRY over any other streaming service. I think the argument for adding it was censorship resistance, but I feel that self-hosted/federated options are better in that case.
It was added because it can be used fairly easily with Tor or a VPN. Google really likes to punish users who use a common VPN or Tor with captchas.
A lot of major YT channels also mirror there, so in a lot of cases you can get the content you want. We never recommended the Odysee platform, as that was a centralized site that really wasn’t much better than anything else.
Also worth noting that is only one client for LBRY there are others. It is not the official LBRY project and that still continues.
Ah I see. Still, the YouTube frontends seem to fulfill this purpose and let you watch all the exact same videos bc they are getting them from YouTube rather than hoping your favorite YouTube channel happens to mirror to LBRY. Also the trouble they’ve had with the SEC doesn’t inspire confidence that they’ll still be around for very long.
I wonder how long that will be the case… It seems to be that might be limited at some point in the future:
No doubt there will be videos which are not able to be pulled from googlevideo.com (what the frontends do) and will require logging in at some point in the future.