This is one thing I actually like them doing. I’m a social watcher and also have other things to do; I want to talk about an episode with friends afterwards, and the phenomenon of racing to binge watch an entire series in one or two sittings ruined that. (As well as forcing me to stay away from half the internet until I’ve binged the series myself due to spoilers). I don’t like being “forced” to binge, much rather savour it one episode at a time as it’s produced, really take in and enjoy and discuss the details of each one. Really makes you appreciate it more IMO.

I see your financial argument though, I guess you could wait until a series is over and then subscribe for 1 month and binge away. Or, of course, yarr.

I’m with you on the high seas ever since Star Trek bounced around from place to place. When you’re thinking “uhhh which do I watch this particular spinoff on, is it Netflix or Amazon Prime or…” it’s already too much like hard work. Then they decided to make the latest exclusive to Paramount, yet another subscription. Eh, nah, at that point it’s time to make like Tascha and Yarr it.

However in part I think the comparison to cable (or would’ve been Sky here) is psychological. With those big services you’re still effectively paying to watch a few shows a bunch of different “streaming services” (channels/networks in that case) but as it’s all bundled up into, say, £60/month, you don’t think about it. Or, the average person doesn’t - personally I’ve never justified that much to watch TV. Now that it’s split out into different payments, £10 here for service A, £10 there for service B, the waste of paying so much to so many different services just to watch a few shows becomes more apparent.

Was going to say piracy then realised you said the general public. I don’t think piracy will ever be as prolific as it was when you could just physically hand your mate a VHS tape - torrenting etc is a bit complex for most, as well as the risk of your ISP getting in touch. Those in the know use VPNs and the like but this is a bit techy for the general public.

I think they’ll just cough up. Most average people don’t micromanage their finances so they don’t notice how a tenner for this streaming a service, a tenner for that streaming service etc ends up adding up to more than their cable/satellite/etc subscription did. They just see “a tenner for Paramount” (or whatever) in a vacuum and figure that it’s not much, rather than adding them all together to work out what their monthly TV cost is.

I keep trying to be charitable and think of it in an “incompetence rather than malice” way, but Linus lying, twisting and tripling down isn’t making it easy.

Wow it’s ALMOST got a slice of the operating system pi!

I literally saw it everywhere on Mastodon, like, I honestly never saw anyone say it directly, just “birdsite” or a censored version. So I adapted to be polite. And sometimes forget which form of fediverse I’m posting on.

I may be misremembering but seem to recall them being early to Tw*tter too. Good sign

Yeah that’s the worry I was alluding to in my second paragraph and I don’t know what the answer is. Probably that it’s a fundamental problem with capitalism.

The recent climate scares shook me up, I’m embracing whatever we can do to reduce our impact. A lot of it is small, but it’s voting with the wallet.

Thing is, the whole economic system relies on a steady stream of “buy a replacement”. If you make something that lasts forever, the maximum number of sales you can make is around 8 billion (usually less). So stuff needs to wear out and break. I’m sure as heck going to challenge it regardless.

And honestly a recent sustainable purchase was a toothbrush by Suri (my old brush broke. It’s still greener to use what you already have if it works). As a very sleek, quiet, well designed product that feels of a high build quality it’s debunked the thought of sustainable meaning “same thing but with sacrifices”. It proved to me that some sustainable stuff can actually be better.

I’m a bit less worried after reading this comment, which explains things like how they DON’T want it to be “DRM for the web” and the proposed measures to prevent it. https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity/issues/28#issuecomment-1651129388

At least one of them requires buying a Google phone to install it on :)

In fact probably all decent compatible phones still involve licensing fees to Google in the purchase price, all of the “alternative” OSes still rely on Google to develop the code base that they copy and strip down, etc. The only other one I can think of is Ubuntu phone, which would be so incomplete you might as well carry a dumbphone at that point.

Trouble is that means using an iPhone. I just came from there. Apple suck in their own unique ways and are no better really.

Another example of Musk being a cunt, what a surprise

I don’t think any of this would stop me from using FF for day to day browsing.

2 - At this point I’d just pirate it. I don’t care. If you’re going to be hostile to paying customers, I’m going to be a non-paying customer again.

3 - Separate banking app. Not bothered about desktop banking

4 - Fine I’ll support local businesses where possible, and use dedicated apps or if necessary Chrome (preferably sandboxed) specifically for shopping where not.

5 - Social media was a mistake anyway, already deleted Twitter, I need very little excuse to get rid of Facebook as well.

Honestly I think this is just the end phase of “Web 2.0” as I remember all this shit being labelled at the time. We managed fine with independent forums etc before and will manage again.

Edit: I love the irony that people are killing off Reddit due to API access but the only way I’ve been able to post on lemmy.world is via the website. Connect app? Nope!

To be honest, maybe I should care about Reddit politics but I don’t really. And so I feel like the mods of the communities I enjoyed are forcing me into protest against my will. But seemingly they have the power to effectively shut Reddit down and so here we are.

The biggest loss is tech support topics. Most useful Google searches lead to Reddit.