Welcome to the November 2019 LBRY Community update!

If you aren’t part of our Discord community yet, join us anytime and say hello! Our community allows LBRYians to interact with the team directly and for us to engage users and grow the LBRY platform. If you don't already, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Telegram.

In this update

• What's new at LBRY?
• Internationalization Update
• LBRY Foundation and the Swarm
• Hive updates
• Giving thanks to our community

Clement and crew journey to Ghana to spread the news about LBRY

What's new at LBRY?

Desktop and lbry.tv

Since our last release, the team has been working to polish up the sign in process, publishing, and account syncing on lbry.tv. This includes the ability to sync encrypted accounts from previous Desktop installations or Android - users will be prompted for their password which may have been set either on their Android device or encrypted Desktop wallet. By default, the passwords will be cached for 2 weeks and users will be re-prompted.

You may have also noticed that lbry.tv had a facelift in terms of color scheme and other minor design elements - this will be coming to the next Desktop release also. You can now also view PDF, markdown, text, html, and other documents files on the web. We now also show the profile picture associated with comments on content/channel pages. Lastly, we've fixed up a few bugs related to channel pages not showing any content - please let us know if you see any issues!

Our last LBRY Desktop update added an autostart option (Windows/Linux only) to the LBRY app so users can benefit from it launching automatically on startup. This will allow faster access of content when coming across a URL and help support the LBRY network by hosting data in the background. You an now also search through your Downloads in the Library section.

SDK

On the SDK side of the house, we’ve shipped updates bringing numerous new features and bug fixes to support cross device syncing scenarios that are currently used by the apps and lbry.tv.

This includes:

• Finalized wallet ID support.
• Allowing multiple wallets to be loaded with an SDK on startup. LBRY.tv currently uses this to support multiple users on a single SDK instance.
• Faster startup for users where UPnP is unavailable.
• Wallet balance caching to support faster responses for the lbry.tv use case.
• All API calls now return paginated results, including file list which previously lacked support.
• We confirmed the IPV6 download fix for Android users.

Purchase transactions and history

Prior to version 0.45, content purchases were regular transactions not directly linked to a claim and information was missing for both the seller and purchaser. This also would prevent the purchaser from viewing the paid content on another device.

To fix this, we implemented a basic purchase history mechanism.

Wallet server installation streamlined

LBRY's strength is in its decentralization. in an effort to further decentralize wallet servers run by LBRY and give users more choice in server selection/access in their region, we’ve been simplifying the entire wallet server setup and deployment process. Running a wallet server requires a full node to be accessible to populate claim/trending data and provide wallet address transaction history.

While this is a bit technical, this equates to more choices for LBRY network users, and increases the robustness of the overall network.

SDK next steps

The SDK team has been focusing on tasks related to supporting the lbry.tv use case which including troubleshooting wallet syncing issues and performance concerns with concurrent usage.

Other items in the pipeline include:

• Improving performance on large wallets and heavy SDK usage on lbry.tv
• Adding basic BitTorrent support
• Improving blockchain headers download directly from wallet servers
• Support content blocking and filtering through wallet servers and reposting of content
• Improving the DHT to help bootstrap the network without seed nodes

LBRY app language translations

Localization is now enabled in the LBRY Android app, and several of our hives have stepped up to add translations for these languages: Gujarati (gu), Hindi (hi), Indonesian (id), Italian (it), Malay (ms), Polish (pl), Spanish (es), Turkish (tr), and Serbian (sr).

On the Desktop, we now have translations (some partial) for 17 languages: Chinese (zh), Croatian (hr), Dutch (nl), French (fr), German (de), Gujarati (gu), Indonesian (id), Italian (it), Malay (ms), Malayalam (ml), Polish (pl), Portuguese (pt), Serbian (sr), Slovak (sk), Spanish (es), Russian (ru), and Turkish (tr).

If your language is not listed above, please consider helping us with translations. You can sign up for your language for the Desktop and mobile projects in Transifex.

If you have been helping translate, we ask you please continue to check Transifex for new strings. We are continually updating and adding new features to both the Desktop/Web app and the Mobile app.

LBRY Foundation and the Swarm

There are some big changes coming to the LBRY community and the Swarm in 2020!

Introducing the LBRY Foundation

The LBRY Foundation has been established as a US-based not-for-profit entity that is legally separate from LBRY, Inc.The organization has been granted the following:

• 5 million LBC
• $20,000
• lbry.org
• All user-driven chat communities (Discord, Telegram)
• As soon as possible, the board and officers of this organization will be filled out with LBRY community members.

Assuming the organization proves successful, more funds will be provided by LBRY, Inc.

Changes to the swarm

As part of this transition, there are two major changes happening to the swarm:

• The level-based Hive grants will be discontinued on December 31st, 2019. The new foundation may choose to keep these, or it may choose to go in other directions (like project-based funding). We think it’s likely that simply counting heads isn’t the right incentive, and we want the foundation to be able to start with a blank slate.

• The Swarm separate swarm chat be merged into the main chat. As part of this, we’ll be revamping the chat rooms, roles, and rooms to start from a neutral place for everyone.

Participate in determining Foundation governance

1. After joining the main Discord at chat.lbry.com, type "!addrole lbryian" in #bots-and-roles channel to be added to the Swarm governance channel.

2. Edit your email preferences (click the link in the footer of every email LBRY has sent you) and ensure the lbry.org box is checked.

Come chat with on us Discord to get involved!

Swarm Hive updates

LBRY Social

LBRY.social has been working hard creating original content for LBRY as well as creating statistics applications that visualize the LBRY network.

Here are some interviews promoting individual creators:

• Richard Harris Q&A Session
• Sarah Corriher Q&A Session

Regarding their statistical applications, LBRY Social had this to say:

"LBRYnomics Top 100 LBRY channels is our most popular page. We get around 1,500 per 30 days at the moment mostly from social media, which is good considering we've not really done anything in terms of SEO/SEM for it, which means this will become even more popular when we concentrate on that part."

"Electron is in the process of programming an independent trending page using Brendon Brewer's new trending algorithm. He's an award winning academic who holds senior positions. So We think articles with this type of info help show how LBRY is taken seriously by serious people."

At LBRY, we've been delighted to see the reactions from creators and all the social buzz the Top Channels page has brought on Twitter. Tools like these help creators better understand tangible benefits from using LBRY.

LBRY India/Block Youth Foundation

Hive Champion Clement visited Ghana funded in part by a LBRY.fund grant. He gives this report from his trip:

"I got to meet some good creators and discussed LBRY with them on how they can start benefiting from the platform. They found LBRY interesting and said they’ll take some time to explore and learn more about it. We discussed how youtube is becoming hard on content creators and how they can take advantage of LBRY to make the best out of it.

I’ve been able to get some solid creators that can drive more Ghanaian content creators to LBRY. They are still exploring the platform, some have already synced and some others with over 50k+ subs will be syncing soon. They will help us drive more creators and users to LBRY as they also do organise content creators meet-ups."

Noob Team hive (Poland)

The Noob Team hive is one of the most creative hives in the Swarm! Every month, they surprise us with how they're reaching out to Polish gamers, YouTubers, and folks on different tech and social channels!

Roman Przybyła coordinated a meetup with F44 Red IT Community featuring a live session with LBRY CEO Jeremy Kauffman.

Roman also has been busy working to enable LBRY to be seen and used in more places. Some of the projects in addition to doing Polish translation include:

• Opening up the LBC exhange on the Bisq Network
• Setting up wallet server, auto-install script, and documentation for QNAP servers
• Helping update Ledger icons to work with the new Ledger X

Meanwhile, Karolajn, who is also a TikTok star, traveled to Warsaw for a huge TikTok meetup. She spent time posing and taking pictures with her fans, and handing out collectible badges promoting LBRY.

LBRY Turkey

LBRY has seen tremendous growth and traffic in Turkey! The LBRY Turkey hive reached out to many Turkish YouTubers and have gotten several of them to sync their channels to LBRY.

One really cool thing they've done to track their progress is to maintain a list of the folks they've contacted.

LBRY China

October was a busy month for this hive! They attended the Blockchain World Forum Conference in Shenzhen, POWPOWER in Beijing, have had substantial growth on their social media accounts, and translated the LBRY app into Chinese!

LBRY.records

With a rebranding to Britrophone, LBRY.records is developing a music distribution company and online label. They plan to handle distribution to both centralized and decentralized platforms such as:

• LBRY (of course!)
• iTunes
• Spotify
• Deezer
• YouTube

You can see their new website here and you can request a demo login if you'd like to see a preview of their publishing platform.

Open Source LBRY

In October, Open Source LBRY hive added thousands of Project Gutenberg books to LBRY, and over 1,300 movies in the public domain.

Kerala Hive

The Kerala hive has been busy recruiting YouTubers to sync their content on LBRY. They have prepared a sample email contact script which they are offering as an example for other hives to use or tailor to suit their needs.

Also this month, Kerala hive completed translation of the LBRY desktop app into the Malayalam language!

Giving thanks to our community

Thanks for reading our update! Enter thanksgiving-pie in the desktop app and we'll give you a nice treat!

Want to develop on the LBRY ecosystem?

All of our code is open source and available on GitHub. Are you a developer and want to find out more? Check out our contributing guide and our LBRY App specific contributing document. Make sure you have turned on the Developer option in your email preferences (see app overview page), or sign up at lbry.tech. We also have a LBRY Discourse Forum where developers can interact with the team and ask questions across all our different projects.

If you aren’t part of our Discord community yet, join us anytime and say hello!

Back to Community Updates

Thanks for supporting LBRY - stay tuned for more news and updates! And if you haven’t downloaded the LBRY app yet, what are you waiting for?