418teapot

Yes, it uses the Linux kernel, but usually when people are talking about running Linux on their mobile they're talking about running GNU/Linux, which is way more free (as in freedom) than any android garbage is. For example it is impossible for me to run arbitrary POSIX compliant shell scripts on an android phone.

echo "127.0.0.1 old.reddit.com" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

If you're not root

I've felt gross for years, ever since they switched from old reddit to the new trash design. I used old.reddit.com for a bit, but stopped once I saw how much tracking garbage ublock was blocking, even on old reddit.

Before lemmy I was using teddit as a privacy focused frontend for reddit which worked great. But now the API changes will kill teddit so no more reddit for me!

Personally I think Spotify is worth $10 a month.

While I agree that there aren't any great self-hosted solutions, more diversity in the music space is important. I refuse to use Spotify, and for me it's not about price. In fact, if they charged more and actually paid their artists more I would probably hate it less. But overall I mostly refuse to use it for other reasons:

It couples the company that delivers your music with the app you must use to stream your music. In my opinion these should be separate - perhaps an open protocol that streaming companies can all use and open source clients that can connect to one or many of them?

Spotify made it clear that they don't care about Linux users when they killed their Linux client. Yes I know about librespot, it's only a trivial decision away from Spotify killing it. And unlike Reddit's API changes, the backlash would be minimal since most people use the official one.

It strongly relies on network effects to get everyone on the platform and keep them there. As mentioned above, this hurts independent artists because they are forced to publish their music on a platform that doesn't pay well just because everyone is on that platform. But there are more than just network effects between artists and consumers: Spotify relies on social-network style antipatterns to keep users in their ecosystem. I've been told by my friends that I am "difficult" because I don't use Spotify and they want to share something with me. That is Spotify's manipulation

Their official client is electron, I don't want to have to run a whole browser stack to listen to music. Not to mention the fact that npm is plagued with supply chain problems and unless the Spotify devs manually audit every dependency of every dependency of every dependency any time they add or update one (doubt it), users are one attack away from being compromised.

When I did briefly use Spotify many years ago I took the time to build up some playlists of music and randomly songs would disappear from the playlists when Spotify lost rights to stream it.

I personally use Bandcamp for recommendations/discovery, and then purchase music I like to listen to and self-host it with MPD. It works great.

I'm not saying this is for everyone, obviously streaming has its merits. But in my experience most people self host not because something costs money, but because they have zero control of the actual experience, and they want to avoid the vendor lock-in issue.

In my opinion getting on the federated messaging train is far more important than what initial homeserver you start on. Technologies like matrix, mastadon and lemmy suffer from network effects and I personally feel like the biggest hurdle is getting over that initial painful hump of getting yourself and the people you want to communicate with all using the technology.

Once you are using the platform regularly you'll have a much better outlook on which homeservers have the users/rooms that you mostly communicate with and you can move there.

I used matrix.org as a home server for years until recently decided that I wanted to support the decentralization and stood up my own instance for me and my close friends to use.

I plan on doing the same with lemmy. I just discovered lemmy today. I have always thought reddit-style boards were prime candidates for federating, but didn't know about this project's existence. I initially had the same hesitation as you when it came time to choose a lemmy instance, but realized it doesn't matter. I just ended up choosing lemmy.world for now until I get more acclimated with the space and then will either stay here, move to another server or self-host.

I watched it all the way through when it came out, haven't done a complete rewatch but I keep going back and re-watching specific skits many times over.