Hi, I’m Michael.

Unlike the more established content sharing platforms, LBRY is free, open and decentralized. This has several benefits over the traditional closed and centralized platforms:

Content creators on LBRY remain in ownership of their content. It’s a peer-to-peer platform with no middle man standing between the creator and their audience, and no single entity controls the entire network. In other words, LBRYians are not at the mercy of the platform. This means there is less chance of being mistreated.

It’s a fairer platform, there is no arbitrary algorithm that decides who gets exposure and who doesn’t. There are no ads which means subpar content will not get rewarded just because it manages to get a lot of clicks through clickbait titles and thumbnails.

Instead, content is rewarded by the community itself. LBRY has even taken it a step further by rewarding those who strengthen the network by contributing storage space and network bandwidth. Think of it as downloading and ‘seeding’ torrent files, except being rewarded for it.

LBRY is also not restricted to one type of content, it supports audio, video and image-files, as well as other forms of digital content. Creators can publish their content for free, or put a price on it and receive 100% of the proceeds.

No middlemen, remember?

Without the dependency on a centralized entity, users are given back the control. To summarize, the LBRY protocol gives power back to the creators!

Yeah, we gotta take the power back
Come on, come on!
We gotta take the power back

– Rage Against the Machine / Take the Power Back

Mastodon is a Twitter alternative which, like LBRY, is also free, open and decentralized. There are no ads or trackers and there’s no company behind it that sells its users data.

Mastodon also implements ActivityPub which is a protocol that allows it to communicate with other ActivityPub powered platforms. These platforms make up the ‘fediverse’.

Instead of Mastodon, Friendica, PixelFed, FunkWhale and other federated platforms being in competition with each other, they become an extension of each other!

Unlike the mainstream social media platforms where the success of one platform weakens the others, the success of one platform within the fediverse strengthens the other platforms within the fediverse. This is a win-win situation for both the platforms and its users as far as I can tell!