Honestly… YouTube Premium is just wasted money. It’s a difficult situation. You can watch YouTube for free and without ads already, by simply using a decent browser like Firefox and installing the uBlock Origin addon to block the ads. (Google is fighting adblockers and anything based on Chrome, so 90% of browsers out there will limit their functionality in the future, btw. Use Firefox or something based on it to keep at least a bit of your privacy and freedom of choice.) And you can even automatically skip the sponsorship messages in videos with Sponsorblock. But if you think you would support the content creators with YouTube Premium, think again. You’re mostly paying Google for their servers / platform. A platform that treats its content creators pretty bad, finds all kinds of ways to not pay them / reasons to demonetize their videos to grab 100% of the ad income and has become more and more privacy invasive and aggressive with ads over the years towards its users. And in terms of music, YouTube doesn’t license every single song individually from the musician. They just pay a royalty towards huge labels and companies like Sony, which in turn keep the absolutely most part of that for themselves instead of paying the artists. Yes, by watching videos for free with adblockers, content creators and YouTube aren’t being paid and in a way you are part of a problem. But consider this: Any subscription based content service like Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube Premium starts by paying its content creators at least a bit of money, but uses bait & switch tactics to lower that payment per stream more and more over time. Once they have all the creators, music / content and viewers comfortably on board, they start grabbing the money for themselves. It’s a systemic issue with streaming platforms in general and always the short end of the stick for the very people who create the content that makes the platform successful and useful in the first place. And if you feel guilty for cutting off the often self-proclaimed “content creators”… YouTube has mechanisms in place to directly support them (while taking a cut for YouTube), like “super chats” and “super stickers” and most of them these days have a Patreon account for direct monetary support and sponsorships going on. But yes, only those content creators who actually offer quality content will benefit from these things, what about all the others, you may ask. Well, let’s be brutally honest. A whole lot of content offered on YouTube is bullshit. It’s either copying successful people’s video style, low-cost, low effort, low quality beginners stuff, clickbait, disinformation, mentally unhealthy nonsense, copyright infringing stuff, and these days even AI generated crap with no value. If all of that would stop being made because no money is to be made on the platform, we wouldn’t miss out on anything. True quality will always be supported directly by fans and sponsors. And as harsh as it sounds… the rest is obsolete and may fall victim to natural selection. Might even raise the quality of content on the platform overall. Feel free to pay for YouTube Premium, if it makes you feel better. But know that absolutely most of it will only benefit Google. Personally, I don’t have the money to pay like 130 bucks a year just to feel like a good person. And those aggressive ads are bad for mental health and sometimes are a vehicle for malware, aside from the technology behind them absolutely shredding your privacy. I’m having none of that. I’ll watch that stuff with adblockers as long as it works, and if that stops working some day, I’ll spend my time with something better, maybe going outside and touching grass or something.

deleted by creator

Thank you so much for sharing these! ❤️ Felt a little awkward to be a one-man-show!

About FreeBSD… I recently wanted to give FreeBSD a shot on my ThinkPad. But aside from the rough idea that BSD should have some more unified and better coding standards than Linux and a few less bugs, already the damn installer bugged out on me. I think that ZFS is a RAM hog, and wanted to try installing it with UFS. I got stuck in the selection between the different partitioning schemes and had to hard reset. I tried again, this time the installation seemed to run through, the system rebooted and no changes were written to the SSD at all, the previous OS I had on there just booted. It simply wasn’t installed, despite showing the entire procedure and progress as if it was… o.O To me, FreeBSD is just as messy as Linux, but with fewer and worse drivers and less modern and comfortable. It doesn’t seem to be any more secure than modern Linux either, so it’s kinda pointless to me. I really wish it was different and it would offer better quality and security, but it seems it doesn’t. At least OpenBSD seems to deliver a fairly more secure OS to make up for its shortcomings like the very limited selection of ported / available software.

After years of frustrated distro hopping on Linux, and with an increasingly risky internet thanks to half the world being in conflict with each other, I’m really close to give OpenBSD a shot on my desktop. I’d love to use it on my notebooks as well, but honestly, I can’t be arsed to deal with the wifi over there. I tried it, it was incredibly slow for some reason and I just don’t feel like fixing that or dealing with it. But on the PC, with ethernet, that is no issue. I’ll still keep a linux distro in dual boot for gaming and some occasional shiny app that isn’t available on OpenBSD though. I think since every OS has its shortcomings, the best approach is to use multiple OS’s and machines to have all the benefits.

There already are a few: https://itsfoss.com/immutable-linux-distros/ and Ubuntu seems to work towards an immutable future as well, I think it’s where most distros well be in a few years. The transition needs time though.

There, I fixed it.

Here, you deserve internet points for this!

I think one can be “open” to a fault. If you cling to principles and morale for the sake of it and without exception or nuance, you set yourself up to be exploited or worse. Many things, entities, interactions in life contradict each other and it is important to set boundaries and make decisions for yourself. Because life and people are multi-faceted and aren’t nice and clean and perfect, which blind, naive idealism fails to take into account. The keyword here is nuance.

Many big tech companies run on greed and inhumane, unhealthy, invasive practices for the sake of pure, blind, unsustainable growth and profit. And I would argue that this is one of the driving factors of the fediverse even existing. If you don’t clearly separate yourself from these practices, then we all can simply use Reddit. But people create, maintain and use alternatives for a reason. Not taking a stance or action against what you want to escape from, even openly inviting it for the sake of being open and on a morally high horse makes simply no sense.

Idealists won’t like to hear this, but it’s the same with peace. Look at Ukraine to have a recent example. Most people want to live and prosper in peace. That is natural and desirable. But there are always some, who profit from war and who try to destroy things, disregarding the fate of others. Or political systems that want to expand territory and exploit / convert whole populations. When the desire for peace is only one-sided, and all attempts of talking or peaceful incentives fail, you can either protect yourself forcefully or be stolen from, raped, tortured, deported or murdered, watching your homeland be turned into ashes and those you love suffer for decades from the consequences.

In the same way, when the desire for openness, humane fairness without exploitation of users is one-sided, you have to draw a line and take a clear stance to defend that “safe space” you seeked in the first place from entities and principles that contradict it. And we have decades of clear evidence how big tech, especially Facebook / Meta operates, they are known to invade user privacy, strive for one-sided power, try everything to avoid or circumvent legal regulation. They have more than earned to be excluded from a place created to offer something better, healthier. And it’s not like we hurt feelings here, it’s a corporation, a virtual, soulless entity.

I can only speak for myself and do what I deem is good for me, so I’ll migrate to Lemmy.ml, because at least they have the balls to stay true to a concept, even if it involves difficult or ugly decisions. And even if blocking Meta won’t fully “protect” the fediverse, at least it is a clear message and limits the amount of power they can achieve and the amount of damage they can do here.

Damn, Roombas are becoming confusingly attractive these days!

deleted by creator

Reading this, I can’t help but imagine it could have been written by a golden retriever. And that is an oddly cute thing to picture. 😀

It was really weird for me to have some honest talks with my parents once I was well into adulthood. It took me way too long to realize they are people with their own problems to solve and a life and preferences, a personal history and all that. It’s weird how you tend to see your parents differently from other people until they deem you old enough to open up.

Fedora Silverblue. But since Fedora aims to include telemetry (although in a reasonable way) by version 40, I’ll switch soon to something else. I feel it might be time to give BSD an honest attempt.

If you want a boring, pretty much dead monoculture of a patch of grass, you gotta work for it. ;) I think that real nature, including useful plants for bees and other critters have much more value. Children should play on lush meadows with flowers and interesting insects to discover, instead of a mentally and visually dull organic carpet, that is merely a facade for wannabe-perfection.

Honestly, I wonder if that even matters. I’ll be the first to admit that I have no deep insight on that matter and that I would simply want to see Meta blocked because it’s a privacy-invading, manipulative entity that sucks up all data it can get in order to force-feed people ads and products. Products that contain algorithms that are extremely unhealthy for mental health, as the only thing they care about is “user engagement”, which is driven by drama and conflict. You get nothing but information bubbles and prioritized bullshit content that stirrs you up. There is no value in that, it’s mostly just harmful. The fediverse apps are being created to offer an alternative to exactly that stuff, and I am here because I want to get away from big tech. If lemmy.world doesn’t take a clear stance to separate itself from the likes of Meta, then there is simply no point in using it over any corporate alternative. I honestly expect lemmy.world to follow lemmy.ml in this clear approach, or I’ll switch instances. I’m just giiving it some time to come to the right conclusion. But if Meta is being allowed to freely interact here and scoop up everything for their purposes, I’ll be on lemmy.ml in about 2 weeks. That’s a reasonable time frame to see a discussion unfold and wait for an outcome. Even if blocking Meta won’t completely stop them from grabbing data here, it’s the right thing to make it harder for them and to send the message that their approach is not wanted here.

😂

Yep. That’s a “Hell, no” for me as well.

Very pretty!

Simple and effective, nice one!