SevYote

There's an XKCD for everything

Always loved the alt text on that one:

I can't remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you're saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it's not literally illegal to express.

I honestly can't remember. There's some options listed here. I might have used Soundiiz? I seem to remember it was something I had to subscribe to, but only for a month just to get all my playlists and likes moved, and then once that was done, canceled the subscription. I remember there were a few cases where a song didn't convert because the name or specific mix or whatever was different, but I could just search it on YTM and add it.

All the computers in the Electronics lab had it installed on them; we wasted so much time playing. That was such a complete screw-off class, haha.

I moved to YTM when Spotify just would not stop trying to shove Rogan down my throat at every opportunity. The iOS app itself has some rough edges but otherwise, no regrets. I used a tool to transfer over my playlists and likes, and from there it's been perfectly good. Plus YT Premium is nice to have, too.

Adding notes to users (for moderation purposes)

Honestly would be cool if that could be done for anybody, not just admins / mods, like Reddit with RES. It lets you add something sort of like a flair to any user that only you can see. You can pick from a list of font colors and just add a short thing, it's very handy.

Even better would be customizable sorting algorithm.

Honestly, while I wholeheartedly support blocking Meta, I'm not in principle opposed to corporations trying to get involved in fedi. I think it's kinda the nature of it that it's not going to be overly corporate-friendly anyways.

It's just that Meta have so thoroughly shown themselves to be bad actors, there's zero reason to give them another chance. It doesn't have to be (IMHO) all-or-nothing. We can be broadly open to companies dipping their toes in the water, while still saying "fuck facebook".

I definitely do not think we should support them, in any way. Meta is just...fundamentally corrupt, greed-driven, with no concerns for the harms they cause. They go beyond just the normal level you expect from big companies. I don't trust them not to mine data from other servers. They've already shown they're more than willing to play fast and loose with legalities around data. They'll do anything they think they can get away with, or can afford the fine for, and sell that data to any devil that can pay.

Like, sure, any other server could do the same thing. But anybody walking by you on the street could knife you, too, right? But the vast, vast majority won't. They wouldn't even think to, let alone have to choose not to. The difference with Meta is that we know that they are actually willing to. Eager to, if there's money to be made.

I would support an outright block. I don't have any real feelings about 'formally' signing onto the pact. There's no reason not to just quietly block, if you rather. Anybody who wants to join fedi can just as easily do it on another instance. For the ones who don't want to stray far from meta...well, I've long since left Facebook behind. I've already said I don't care about losing them.

In theory, Homebrew should solve this, but I've just had so many bad experiences with it over the years, I won't touch it. All the problems you can imagine from trying to tell a non-techy friend over voice, without screensharing, how to do all that stuff you just listed? Brew seems to make those same mistakes half the damned time, and leave your system / the app in a weird, half-installed state. It seems like most app devs have come to the same conclusion and just make actually good installers. It's unfortunate that it's come to that, but there ya go. I honestly have no idea if that's a Homebrew problem or if it's just doing its best with what apple gives it to work with, but either way.

I've had better experiences with Chocolatey on Windows, but for casual / everyday use it's just so rare I need to install something that doesn't have its own nice installer, so I very rarely run it.

I think back to this article quite a bit, lately. The basic idea is that social media sites seem, by the numbers, to be doing fine, and then they abruptly collapse. The trick is that when the people who create high engagement - people who make posts that make people super happy or angry or whatever, as long as they are feeling something and therefor getting engaged - when those people start to post less because they're spending some of their energy on some other new site, the old one gets kinda hollowed out. It's not obvious it's dying until it's dead.

I don't know if reddit is done for, but I can say that lemmy and mastodon are feeling a lot more fleshed out, lately, compared to past waves of people coming from twitter. It feels like turning a corner, or crossing a critical mass threshold; it's getting easier to stay engaged and not feel the need to check the old giant sites.

For folks considering paying for YT, note that you get YT Music Premium bundled in with it. The music premium alone is only $2/mo cheaper than the bundle.

I got it when I bailed on Spotify, and gotta say, the app is a little less polished, but I don't miss Spotify a bit. Just putting it out there if you were looking for a push to get yourself off Spotify or a push to get YT ad-free, there ya go. It works out to $10/mo if you get the annual plan, so same as Spotify Premium, plus yanno, the YouTube benefits. It's a pretty decent deal tbh.