According to their website, “LBRY is a free, open, and community-run digital marketplace.” In LBRY, content producers share videos and set a price for them, where the price is in LBC, LBRY’s blockchain backed cryptocurrency. For the concerned, I have found that most of the content out there is the wonderful price of free, which is fine by me.

A word of warning - LBRY is (currently) only accesable via a client. If you aren’t particularly interested in mucking around with finicky software and just want to watch videos, then I’d recommend checking out BitChute, a web-based decentralized YouTube alternative that uses WebTorrent.

LBRY packages their software for Debian/Ubuntu, but it’s possible to install it on most major distributions. I ran into some pretty major trouble, which I thought made the process worth documenting. If, after installing libsecret, you have an error that looks like one of these:

(node:28375) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: Unhandled promise rejection (rejection id: 1): Error: Error calling StartServiceByName for org.freedesktop.secrets: Timeout was reached

or

** Message: Remote error from secret service: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.secrets was not provided by any .service files

then chances are you don’t have a daemon running that implements org.freedesktop.secrets. To fix this on Debian, install gnome-keyring.

$ sudo apt install gnome-keyring

Depending on your setup, you may need to start the daemon:

$ gnome-keyring-daemon