CoderKat

For password manager, I swear by Bitwarden. It's open source, has a self hosted option, and 100% usable for free. They have a very cheap subscription option for some not too vital features (most particularly support for using Bitwarden as your TOTP app and encrypted file sharing).

I have quite a few, as I find streaming services in general to be very much worth my money and to be very convenient. It's when stuff isn't on any streaming site where I personally consider piracy acceptable. While I dislike the fragmentation of streaming services, I will pay for whatever streaming service the content I want to watch is on. I do want to support things I enjoy so long as the price is reasonable, and streaming service prices are all reasonable in my book.

• Youtube Music - I switched from Spotify ages ago due to content it didn't have at the time, but may no longer apply. I recently upgraded to Youtube Premium because I've started using Youtube more often and detest ads.
• Disney+ - I've found that here in Canada, D+ is the best streaming service in terms of quantity of content. We basically get all or most of what is on Hulu in the US.
• Crave - In Canada, this is basically how you get HBO content. I subscribed to watch The Last of Us and have been sticking around to watch older HBO shows too.
• Amazon Prime - This is mostly for the shipping. The fact I get some shows out of this is a bonus. It has fewer shows that I care about.
• Nintendo Premium - For multiplayer and also some DLCs that got included with it. I find this to be the lowest value of the subscriptions I have, especially since I rotate what consoles I'm using and am strongly considering canceling it.
• Dropbox - offsite backup is important and I don't want to manage it myself (nor have the risk that comes with that).
• Some random Patreons and most recently lemm.ee's equivalent.

I'm not currently subscribed to Netflix because I regularly rotate what streaming service I'm subscribed to. When I'm done with what I'm watching on Crave and/or Disney+, I'll unsubscribe to those and maybe resubscribe to Netflix. Rinse and repeat. In the past, I've also used Paramount+ (worst streaming app I've ever used), Dropout (I subscribed for Game Changer and stuck around because of Dimension 20, but haven't had the time, so unsubscribed for now), and Ubisoft+ (I did the math and concluded it was better to subscribe for 2 months to play Far Cry 6 and Assassin's Creed Valhalla than to buy the full games with all their DLC -- I'll totally do it again next time they have a newer release I wanna play).

I make good money and really have no concerns with paying for all these. A couple dozen bucks a month for entertainment is nothing for me and highly worth it, especially to avoid any wrangling with finding and acquiring content. I also feel strongly about wanting to pay any reasonable amount for things I enjoy. To me, piracy is almost entirely about access and not about price. Heck, these days, most piracy I've done is for older games that you literally cannot find legitimately anymore.

I'm strongly of the opinion that we should never be hiding the domain for either communities nor users. The domain is an important part of both of those. !Technology@beehaw.org and !Technology@lemmy.world are entirely separate communities and may have very different rules, so it's important to know which one you're on.

And for users, impersonation aside (because let's be honest, impersonation could just as easily utilize display names or look-a-like characters), there's also just plain confusion from legitimate users. Common usernames are totally going to be used across multiple servers. If you're seeing comments from john@smith.name and also john@lemmy.world, you're gonna wanna be able to tell them apart (display names kinda run counter to this and I'm not certain they're a good idea).

It was probably that. Despite having given it an hour before asking for help, checking it now (less than 10 minutes after posting this meta post), it now shows up in the lemm.ee version of the community. Incidentally, lemmy.world appears to have an outage right now, which perhaps is the root cause (though it was working fine when I posted this).

Heads up, it's ideal to link like !newcommunities@lemmy.world (without the auto generated link format -- why does it do that??). Markdown: [!newcommunities@lemmy.world](/c/newcommunities@lemmy.world). That way the link is relative to whatever instance any particular reader is on. The link you posted goes straight to lemmy.world and thus any reader who isn't a lemmy.world user will have a barrier in usage (they won't be able to subscribe or comment and any relative links in that sub will also have usage barriers).

Plus it wasn't just Frodo, but Frodo and Sam as a team. Sam doesn't get enough credit. The ring is a corrupting influence and it's almost to be expected that any one individual will get corrupted by it eventually. Frodo managed to get it very far with fairly minimal corruption with Sam helping for the times when Frodo struggled.

Sam, you the real MVP.

I also currently have accounts on two different instances (one being kbin and one a lemmy instance) to better be able to switch to whatever features I most want (right now, Lemmy gets pretty much all the apps and has collapsible comments, so I'm leaning towards it) and also to switch between during downtime. The small size of individual instances means downtime is inevitible.

(Though I sure hope we get a better way to do this in the future -- even just syncing your subscriptions is currently a pain.)

And they can't be honest about that because they know it's a bad opinion. At least if they outright said the honest answer, I could understand it a little. If they're a straight, white male and have zero empathy for anyone else, it would probably benefit them (at the cost of everyone else).

But even if they have zero empathy, they still know that anyone who does have empathy (or isn't a straight, white male and has the slightest bit of understanding for what's going on) will never agree with them. So they have to come up with all sorts of bullshit. Hence how we get stuff like comparisons to lobsters, unsupported claims that LGBT whatever is harming kids, and general turning a blind eye to any blatantly harmful stuff that progresses their goals.

I'm not sure if it's dying because this constantly happens. Practically all the image hosts I grew up died ages ago (and many of their replacements, too). Dead image links in older forums are more common than working links. I think it's very difficult to create a sustainable image and video host, especially when people want to use it mostly in embedded or direct links, which really limits the ability to monetize.

I think websites hosting their own images is often ideal because:

1. It will reduce how many places link to an image, since where forums and social media are concerned, so that if the host of the image goes down, so does the place that links to it, avoid the quite frustrating issue of dead links (which can clutter search results in an unhelpful way -- search results generally will never be able to find the image without the page that references it, anyway).
2. The forum is best able to monetize. Direct links to images on different hosts can't really be monetized, but if it's the same host, then it's just one, obvious host to pay for (and so far, the Fediverse seems to be getting a sustainable amount of donations -- heck, I've donated $20 to my original host so far myself).
3. It ensures that the users of the image are the ones that feel the pain of hosting. When it's a separate image host, it's removed from you. But if it's your Fediverse instance (or reddit or whatever social media), the sustainability is closer to you and thus you're more likely to donate to help it run or be understanding of things like ads.

That said, the big downsides are inefficiency and tooling. Central hosts meant more efficient caching. Stuff like GIFs in particular are often common memes. I bet the 1000 most common memes are reused by thousands of sites worldwide and thus work great in a CDN (content delivery network -- basically a distributed cache for media files). As well, central sites can build embeddable widgets or stuff like GIF keyboards (e.g., the default Android keyboard, GBoard, has GIF support with I think GIPHY and Discord seems to use Tenor). If every site has to host their own, that's a lot of reinventing the wheel. Common libraries can help, but not to the extent that a managed cloud service can.

As an aside, I wonder if Google and Discord pay for that GIF integration into their products?

Yeah, Youtube seriously needs to improve ad quality. I personally totally get that it's an expensive site to run and have no problems with the fact that it needs to turn a profit (not every site can get by on donations alone and that's okay). But the ads can get really bad sometimes. The majority are fine, but the number of scams and NSFW ads are still too high.

TBH, I just paid the extra $2 to go from Youtube Music to Youtube Premium because I really didn't want to see those ads and didn't wanna deal with figuring out ad blocking for a Chromecast. But Youtube Premium isn't worth it if you're not already using Youtube Music (I would not have paid $12 for it) plus you have to use Youtube a certain amount for it to be worth it. Plus, of course, it shouldn't be necessary to pay them not to see ads just to avoid seeing the bad ads.

And all this does nothing about Youtube recommending videos (not ads) that are unethical. They don't do a good job at curating videos. Heck, there's been times where they age restrict LGBT videos for simply having any LGBT references but they'll leave up crypto scams and hate speech filled alt right videos.

I'm gonna try that one soon myself, because I keep seeing comments like yours and that's usually a good sign.

Similar for me is Outer Wilds. I keep seeing people highly recommend it (and to go in blind), so I intend to do exactly that.

Stardew Valley is the GOAT. I've bought it 4 times (one for me and my ex on Android and again for each of us on PC) and would happily buy it again because it's worth every penny.

I wonder if Stardew's mods work on the Steam Deck? I'm not certain. But the game has amazing mods that completely change the focus of the game and add a ton of content.