We are actively being held back by companies catering exclusively to the lowest common denominator.

If you’re just watching movies and tv I highly recommend just grabbing one of the streaming sites from the masterlist. Use a good ad blocker and you’re golden.

Yeah, obviously reactionary just means anything I personally disagree with. Duh.

Wouldn’t they need to already have your data to check your driver’s license against it?

How could they do this to my -viches

Just be careful actually using that international data for too long cause I used it when I took a semester abroad and they shut off my data and account access literally on the day of my flight back home and kept billing me for months after when I didn’t have access to my account to cancel billing for my (non-)service. They say the majority of your service should be spent in the US but they don’t actually define anywhere what that means to them. They just tell you one day that you’re shit out of luck and not eligible for service anymore (including domestically).

None of their support people were able to help by turning my service back on long enough to get back to the states or even just telling me how to get back into good standing. The only thing they were able to tell me is why it was shut off.

Anyways if you do need international data, airalo was really reasonably priced and easy to set up. Came in clutch. Fuck google up the ass for leaving me stranded like that.

Im having a great experience on samsung internet with adguard and blokada 5 (on a pixel 7 if it’s relevant)

Originally, it was being a child and not having any money of my own, and my mom getting out her wallet to enter card information on a website she had no previous knowledge of, for something she would never use personally, was a whole… thing that I can probably count on my hands the number of times it actually happened. So I stopped even asking and figured it out myself.

Edit: also, we had netflix but sometimes the shows I wanted to keep up with were still airing and I couldn’t wait.

Now, I just don’t think any company that would take my money in exchange for, generally temporary, access to media/software really deserves or needs my money all that much, and especially not more than I do. I also strongly resent that there is not a public and legal domain for things that are older than like 5 or 10 years and not actively being worked on.

could you possibly share a link that isn’t hosted on twitter cause I don’t log into twitter anymore as a rule.

Session buddy was a big one for me in college when I had an overwhelming number of tabs open but didn’t want to forget about what was on them. Basically just archives all your open tabs to a single page you can refine and look back at, so you can quickly just close everything and start fresh without actually losing anything meaningful or cluttering up your bookmarks.

The marvellous suspender helped prevent those tabs from using so much memory. Chrome hogs enough memory as it is lol.

I have one called tab manager plus which looks handy but I honestly forgot it was there before I ever actually used it lol

Right cause I think having both having access to normie content and giving normies access to fediverse content is a positive thing if we can balance out the power dynamic with meta. Blocking threads content would just defeat the purpose imo, it would prevent people from leaving threads for the fediverse because they wont be able to get the same content. If threads has it all and fediverse doesn’t, most people are just going to go to/stay at threads. It could backfire.

Maybe if instances could allow meta users to see their posts to pique their interest/gain exposure, but meta users have to join any other instance in order to interact? Kind of like an ad I guess but UI native and unpaid. Though I’m really not sure if the fediverse platform would even support such things in the first place, and if meta couldn’t just fire back with the same thing. It’s just the first thing that comes to mind.

The fediverse’s number one issues right now as I see it are accessibility and content density. I get the concerns people have with EEE but I also struggle not to see this as handling that last E (exterminate) ourselves just to spite meta. I want to join threads just to see what my friends and everyday people are posting, and I’d really like those people to join the fediverse so I can interact with them here. The only things keeping me away from threads however are privacy concerns and supporting meta, so being able to see the same content on a different instance might just be the best of both worlds.

Agree. Excel is terribly inefficient if your goal is just storing data.

On the other hand I was genuinely torn between the pixel 7 pro and the pixel 7a when I lost my Pixel 5 because I wanted the pro features but the smaller size of the 7a. Ended up getting the pro because the size wasn’t so far apart to make much of a difference, both were massive anyways compared to the 5.

But I bought second hand open box so maybe I’m not in the demographic that matters to Google.

man I just miss being able to type and reach all corners of the screen with one hand without having to be a contortionist or accidentally clicking on the one-handed keyboard that I never actually use because I’ve already resigned to always using two hands anyways

I’ve since realized that you can turn off the one handed keyboard completely but the fact that it has to exist at all still annoys me

I’m no media expert but I think that’s exactly why they do it

Never heard of stations before today, wish I got a chance to try it though. Looks like it came out just after they removed the radio feature from the main app. Damn…

I tried Pandora, I think for a year or two. It’s alright but after a while I started falling into the same artist bubbles I experienced with post-radio Spotify. It’s owned by Sirius which isn’t doing so well (and I can’t stand their marketing practices) so I can’t imagine they’ve got as much resources to devote as Spotify. The app is a little buggy and rudimentary but not completely lacking polish.

The behavior when your Internet drops out (like if you happen to go driving out in the sticks) leaves a lot to be desired, but you can save playlists so it’s not a huge deal. There’s this one live version of a song that just does not want to stay deleted from my playlist. Oh, and you can’t use it outside of North America without a VPN. It’s little stuff, it’s not experience-breaking for the most part.

I do like that you switch between different algorithms for a radio station. Something like “fan favorites”, “artist only”, “deep cuts”, maybe one or two more options. It’s overall not a bad alternative, the bad parts obviously stick in my head better than the good but I’d probably still be using it weren’t for my European friends all using Spotify and sharing songs/playlists with me like that.

Nah I’m not talking about stations, I’m talking about radio. It was like, the main feature of Spotify for a while.

The “radio” you can make nowadays isn’t a radio at all, it’s a static playlist and a lot of the times the playlist it generates is just 50% ripped from my listening history, resulting in artist bubbles that for me have proven impossible to escape. Same deal for the music they generate when a playlist ends. A bunch of playlists paired with an algorithm that doesn’t accept feedback simply cannot fill the role that was the original Spotify radio.

I remember when it was a literal radio feature in Spotify and it was this but the algorithm was decent and you could curate different stations.

Oh no, some troll on the internet thinks I’m the one with issues. What will I ever do.

Yeah they probably serve it to certain demographics like “men between 25 and 45” or something.

I’ve never gotten ads even close to what they describe but probably because I’m a woman and fall on the elder end of gen z. So I get God awful temu and tiktok ads and then what I assume is just served to the general populace like whatever latest child mower they’re calling a consumer truck these days.