Soo, I just set up my own Piped instance and noticed that you could disable “LBRY-integration”. I did a very quick search and learned that this is some sort of decentralised content sharing thingy. I thought nothing much of it at the time, assumed it was some way to speed up streams or whatever and just went on with my day. I did discover that Odysee was made with that protocol, so I assumed it was just some PeerTube-ish thing.

Until today. I just saw the “LBRY is shutting down”-post on this community. I read it and noticed that LBRY was some kind of web3-nonsense? That got me looking. So the way I understand LBRY, it’s basically an Indexer on a Blockchain that points to BitTorrent content which is then served as online media… right? I’m confused.

Now I have two questions:

What and why is LBRY?
How and why is Piped using LBRY?

Hope someone can enlighten me :)