Hello there!
Many of you consider LBRY and Odysee as a good alternative to YouTube, because it does not track you, and does not do evil things.
Let me clear up your heads.
LBRY and Odysee still tracks you. It does still use an algorithm, that recommends you content. To be honest, it isn’t really different from YouTube. You need a phone number to verify, or other personal information. They use third-party components, to provide their services like Google AdSense. If it grows more, then we will get to the same point, what we have now with YouTube. (If they don’t make a change.)
From LBRY Inc. Privacy Policy:
How do we use your information?
We may use the information we collect from you when you register, make a purchase, sign up for our newsletter, respond to a survey or marketing communication, surf the website, or use certain other site features in the following ways:
To personalize your experience and to allow us to deliver the type of content and product offerings in which you are most interested. To improve our website in order to better serve you.
Google, as a third-party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on our site. Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to our users based on previous visits to our site and other sites on the Internet.
Third-party links
Occasionally, at our discretion, we may include or offer third-party products or services on our website. These third-party sites have separate and independent privacy policies. We therefore have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of these linked sites. Nonetheless, we seek to protect the integrity of our site and welcome any feedback about these sites.
This is hardly a breaking issue, since all the javascript is in fact free and open source, you just need to put an exception in your browser settings.
To be fair, the source repository is open source, but you have no idea what kind of modifications the server admin made to the frontend you’re getting. Even though it’s AGPL and they’re supposed to open source their changes, nothing’s actually preventing them from just not doing that.
My advice for anyone worried about this is to only access Peertube from an open source client installed on your computer, preferably built from source yourself, since then you can be almost 100% sure that the code is actually open source.