Odyssee was created by a now defunct New Hampshire cryptocurrency company and recently emerged from bankruptcy dedicated to keeping it, "censorship resistant."

David Duke, former grand wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, frequently posts videos on a website called Odysee. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones also streams his podcast, “The Alex Jones Show,” on the site. It works a lot like YouTube and attracts millions of views each month.

Anti-hate groups say the site is a hotbed of extremism where users from around the world — including promoters of U.S.-designated terrorist group the Nordic Resistance Movement, Holocaust deniers and Proud Boys supporters — use Odysee’s data storage and financial features to spread their views and raise money. Users also take advantage of the forum’s near complete lack of content moderation. The site’s CEO said he’s dedicated to keeping the company “censorship resistant.”

The site also comes with strong New England ties. Odysee was created by a now-defunct New Hampshire cryptocurrency company and began with seed money from a downtown Boston-based venture capital firm called Pillar VC, financed by a diverse constellation of local investors.

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  • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldM
    17·
    2 months ago

    This is kind of a complicated issue. We haven’t figured out federated video yet. Hosting is expensive, and instances are unreliable, search is abysmal. If you happen to already know a creator that uses peer tube, it’s easy enough to follow them, but like a lot of the fetaverse, discoverability is low.

    Odysee bridges that gap between giant, centralized video hosting behemoth Google/YouTube and truly free video hosting.

    There are a lot of creators who have ideological aversion to being hosted on YouTube, Which includes a lot of FOSS and privacy people like Louis Rossmann or Naomi Brockwell. It also means unfortunately that there are some people who leave mainstream services because their ideas are so repugnant, that they get banned.

    Anyway, here are the official community guidelines from their website.

    Content or posts that incite hatred or violence towards a particular group or person(s) based on, but not limited to the following:

    Ethnicity, Disability, Nationality, Race, Gender, Religion, Sexual orientation, Social class/caste, Gender identity/expression

    Content or posts that promote terrorism, criminal activity, or credibly calls for violence (coordinated or otherwise), for example:

    Sincere encouragement of others to go to a particular place to commit/perform violence, or to target groups or individuals with violence

    Promotion of recruitment into terrorist and/or criminal groups

    Sincere promotion of terrorist and/or criminal groups

    Sincere promotion of terrorism and/or criminal activity

    • fpslem@lemmy.worldOP
      9·
      2 months ago

      So the community guidelines aren’t being enforced? I still think that’s a problem. The federated video sites I’ve used (mostly peertube instances, tbh) all have community guidelines, and if they didn’t enforce them, I wouldn’t use the sites.

      • WolvenSpectre@lemmy.caEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        Even though they are smaller than YouTube a huge amount of video gets uploaded so they largely rely on reports. The issue is that for the reports to work, people have to actually got to watch their videos and, for their team to get to them, they have to get multiple reports. This was made worse by they capital expenditure they went through while fighting their classification.

    • cosmicrookie@lemmy.world
      8·
      2 months ago

      I am no content creator but i do occasionally make videos that i want to share.

      I am therefore not bound to youtube but i can’t use odysee because the recommended videos are clearly racicst. I share a video about goldfish and odysee recommend. Videos about why ‘white is better’ or ‘what i love about Hitlers’… after a talk in the community’s discord i realised that it was not a place for me to be in

    • JoYo@lemmy.mlEnglish
      7·
      2 months ago

      no peertube instance can handle open registration and last longer than a couple of years.

      even google is having a hard time storing all the video that gets uploaded.