Welcome to the September 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?
• LBRY.tv is nearly here
• LBRY Android Butterfly Released
• New Daily Rewards!
• Hacktoberfest
• We're looking to create new hives!
• Hive Updates
• LBRY App in More Languages
• Community Block Explorer
• Yummy Dessert!

What's New at LBRY?

LBRY Desktop, Android, and Web App Software

Since our last update, progress has been made on a number of our Roadmap items, including:

• Software app for Android, desktop, and the web. the app team shipped our next named release, 0.35, under codename Franklin as well as a few patches. Franklin enhances the app experience with a brand new videojs-based video player.

• Other new features in Franklin include:

  • The ability to continue watching videos in pop out mode
  • Support of range requests (streaming)
  • The ability to block channels app-wide

Video Player and Download Settings

The new video player fixes a number of bugs and includes new features like volume control, ability to play more video codecs, and you can also skip anywhere in the video instantly.

Did you say you don't want to download every video? We heard your feedback! There are two new settings for saving hosted content and files. Users who wish to disable either or both can do so.

LBRY.tv

Over the last few months, we’ve been running a view-only pilot of beta.lbry.tv, meaning you can view free content, but many of the other features like wallets, rewards, and publishing have been disabled.

We also added some tags so when you share a LBRY file on social media such as Twitter or Facebook, you will see a preview and description of the actual content instead of a generic LBRY image.

LBRY for Android

Announcing the release of Butterfly! Since our last update, the Android app has been playing catchup with the Desktop app’s discovery features - this includes the ability to follow tags and explore tags, create channels, and publish (and edit!) content. We’re also excited that some of the more profound performance problems with the Android app have been resolved. The publish process now includes automatic uploading of thumbnails, and you can also tag your content, create a channel, select a URL, and adjust your default LBC bid.

All of the details of the latest release are here.

New Daily Rewards!

Weekly rewards tied to the LBRYCast email have gone away, but now you can earn even more LBC with the new daily watch rewards! Each day you watch a video, you'll receive a random award of between 1 and 100 LBC. Enjoy!

Hacktoberfest is Here!

As an Open Source company, LBRY is excited to participate in Hacktoberfest again this year! Submit Pull Requests to our Github project repos to earn a brand new limited-edition collectible LBRY Hacktoberfest t-shirt and other swag.

The details will be posted here as they are available, including requirements to earn swag and other activities we'll be hosting in October.

We're recruiting for existing and new hives!

The LBRY Swarm is a community program to promote awareness, use, and development of the LBRY protocol and network. We believe in empowering people across the globe to be able to promote and monetize their content and regain control from corporate-controlled centralized platforms.

We need your help to grow the Swarm program. There are a number of potential hive focus areas, and we're interested in new hives or for existing hives to curate content in these areas:

• Fine Art
• Photography
• Fan Art (think DeviantArt)
• Science topics
• Craft How-tos
• Life Hacks/How-tos
• News
• Free Speech
• Activism
• Environment
• Arabic
• French
• Gaming

If you’re interested in finding out more about the Swarm program, how to start a hive, or join one, please check out this link.

We have a new Discord home for the Swarm, and you can join here and ask us questions about the program or find an interesting hive!

Selected Hive Updates

Open Source LBRY

Open Source LBRY has been focused on uploading all of Project Gutenberg to LBRY. There are a total of over 60,000 books in the project, and you can see works from Project Gutenberg channel here.

LBRY India - Blockchain Youth at LPU

LBRY India hive attended this event, and Clement was featured and spoke about LBRY as an emerging blockchain technology and the opportunities for young adults to get involved! We're excited to see Clement's involvement as Blockchain Youth develops into its own organization.

Clement tells the audience about LBRY and blockchain opportunities

There was a fantastic turnout for the event

A LBRY user talks about how she uses LBRY to host her content

LBRY.social

This hive has been working on many different objectives, including a weblog. Here is an excellent case study they've written about Turkish creator Efe Aydal and his success on the LBRY platform.

Dr. Brendon Brewer has been working with Mark Firth to create a visualization of LBRY statistics. Take a look here to see their progress: https://lbry.social/lbrynomics/

Brendon Brewer LBRYnomics

China Hive

The China Hive is attending the Blockchain World Forum Conference, October 24-25 in Shenzhen, through a grant from the LBRY fund. The website for the conference is here.

New LBRY Uganda Hive!

We're excited to have our first hive in Africa!

Our Uganda community held their first LBRY meetup. We love to see LBRY, open source, and blockchain technologies spread worldwide.

LBRY Uganda has even created special t-shirts for their members.

Noob Team Hive

Noob Team Hive is always coming up with imaginative ideas! Most recently, they created an activity easy enough for any skill level to participate. They love our LBRY mascot, Yerbil the Gerbil, and have created fan art variations:

LBRY App Language Translations

We have internationalized the LBRY App! We have added new languages like Bahasa Indonesia, Polish and German, and we will soon have many others. If you're interested in adding a language or helping translate please contact Julie.

Community Block Explorer

A community member by the name of Alessandro Spallina became interested in the LBRY ecosystem and wanted to implement a more modern and fully featured block explorer that exposes important metrics of the LBRY blockchain.

You can check out his GitHub issue outlining what he plans on developing or you can go straight to the explorer prototype at lbryexplorer.tech to give it a shot.

He’d appreciate any feedback on the GitHub issue and current prototype - you can leave a comment on GitHub or reach out on Discord #dev channel by tagging @SK3LA.

Since you've read this far here's your dessert! 🍦

We appreciate your attention and now we have a little dessert for you. Enter lbry-ice-cream in the desktop app and get a few sprinkles of LBCs!

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?