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I’ve been surprised by how effective it’s been to say, respectfully, “this is important to me,” maybe adding “here’s why.” Got all my siblings, mom, SO, and best friend on Signal, that’s a vast majority of my online conversations.

reddit is orders of magnitude bigger then lemmy, but I find lemmy high quality and has more people with similar values- more than i could ever keep up with.

Back when Adobe went subscription-only, I stopped using it on my personal work and devices even though a lot of my previous work depended on it. Had to switch to different tools, but now there are better options. Not only has Adobe stagnated, but they caused an even bigger exodus when they messed with the ToS to train ai on user data.

I switch to linux a few years ago and now when I have jobs that use windows I realize how clunky it actually is, and it’s only getting worse while linux has been getting better.

I’m fully degoogled (also a graphineOS user). It took me years to eliminate each service, but I was sick of these giant companies that could never give me the things I wanted because in interferes with what they want (ad revenue). The only thing you can do is take it all back. Participate as little as possible. These companies will not stop getting worse while people continue to use them.

It can be inconvenient, time-consuming, and hard, but there are options, and it is a lot easier now than it was a decade ago. I see no reason why it wont continue to get easier and more accessible. That’s why it’s important for tech savvy folks to do what they can, now, and make it easier for those who come after them. Personally, I’ve done a lot for myself, but need to learn more about hosting securely so I can offer close friends and family better alternatives that they can easily access.

I wanted something similar from a remote company I was working for. They were pretty good about fulfilling requests, but when I asked for a good kvm switch they said they had trouble in the past and instead recommended a usb hub that can toggle between machines. Then connect both machines to the same monitor and toggle the input. Not ideal, but low cost and functional. Might not suit your needs (would be annoying if you have to frequently toggle back and forth), but if you’re just trying to share your desk space between a work machine and personal, and the monitor input is easy to toggle, it’s worth considering.

I don’t think they have the ux advantage that their wealth suggests due to misaligned incentives. A good portion of their investment is getting users to see as many ads as they will tolerate. Try to modify any privacy settings, for example, and the ux is as garbage as amazon.

Fediverse and self hosted, open source alternatives are still relatively new. Folks have to expect some turbulence. As things grow and more bug reports and contributions can be made, the ux could be superior because they can give users what they want instead of maximizing monetization.

Misskey is a federated facebook alternative I heard about on mastodon recently. I’m not too familiar with it myself, but seems worth mentioning.

It has a “groups” feature that might avoid the “instance per person” lemmy workaround you were thinking about. According to this comparison misskey doesn’t have a like button, but a few of its forks do. Not sure about the upload experience; may depend on the app. I didn’t see any clients listed on their site but did a quick search for an iOS app, which exists, so i assume android, too.

Sorry I don’t have more info, but I hope that’s useful. Best of luck! I’ll be looking for a similar solution in the near future.

Well said and a core concept people need to understand to appreciate data privacy/sovereignty. Simply calling it data overlooks what it often is: your behavior over time. We don’t call it PII but few things are more personally identifying.

I was surprised by a recent, popular comment here on lemmy where someone advised against using cash because of missing out on rewards. A majority of people don’t appreciate the tradeoffs here. By default, banks and private companies have more info on us than we have on ourselves. To think that they’re going to do anything that benefits us more than them is naive. While not everything is zero sum, we are talking about extractive, profit seeking industries.

Cash seems like the best defense on this front. I recent switched back to cash, and continue to track my own finances; Bank sees $500 withdrawal; I see $34.45 at grocery store, $19.20 at hardware store, etc.

Pro tip: try random but memorable phone numbers at checkout. Now you can enjoy the savings, and salt/contaminate the data extraction of others. The more randomness (where and when you shop, what you buy, which numbers you use) the better.

All the metadata perhaps (still very valuable), but client-side, zero-access encryption means it’s encrypted before it hits the servers. So while a data leak might, for example, show who, when, and how much you’re emailing, it wouldn’t show the content of the email as gmail would.

Moving in the direction of better and voting with your dollars is an important step away from already enshittified structures, which I’d argue, are inherent to certain models and not others. EG: a self hosted, open source software developed by a non-profit could sell and incorporate and enshittify, but the possibility of forking is an effective disincentive that could easily eat projected gains.

💯 There’s more software, games, movies, music, people, etc than I’ll ever be able to interact with in my entire life. So much good to be found when you don’t waste time on all the extractive, disrespectful, enshittified BS. Edit: dropped word.

To add another layer: allowing homelessness is one of the most widespread and visible acts of violence perpetrated by the state, supported by the market, and accepted-- or at least tolerated-- by most of the public. I wonder if institutions don’t address it because scares people into obedience.

Reflect on the focus of violence in stories about slavery. Hypothetically, without violence, slavery is still awful: robbing a human of their autonomy, spending their lives bettering the lot of those in power rather than their own. But we focus on the violence, not only because of the obvious, visible horror, but because you can’t rob someone of their autonomy without violence.

When it comes to homelessness, the violent act is not only inaction: failing to address risks and pitfalls, or add safety nets (focusing on growth, instead), but also what your original post is about: removing public facilities, forcing people to play the line-go-up game in order to have nice things, lest they have a string of bad luck and end up on the street, exposed to the elements.

The state and market didn’t cause the blizzard that may kill unhoused people, but they did nothing to try to get them out of its path. Isn’t that the purpose of these institutions? Yet homelessness is everywhere and it makes being unemployed all the more terrifying-- to be that much closer to the streets. “Better to take what you can get,” participate in an unjust market or it could be you.

From my research, Patreon takes a smaller cut than YouTube Premium. Comparing YouTube Premium to its own ad model is a “Worst Negates the Bad” fallacy. From what I gathered (not easy to find and has changed over time) YT takes 30% from the former and 45% from latter. Seems insanely high. More than taxes. May be why so many creators need sponsors and hawk merch.

YouTube never supporting 3rd party apps seems like a negative.

Lots of suitable alternatives to youtube: read a book, listen to music, go for a walk, hang with friends, play games, etc, but to your point, sounds like a monopoly. Their search was once great, then ubiquitous, now terrible. YouTube Premium is just in the “entice users and creators” phase of its inevitable enshittification.

Don’t mean to dump on something you like, just disagree with the reasoning. If you’re not fine with Premium and hate giving money to google, sounds like you’ll eventually seek out alternatives when they go into profit maximization mode. Hopefully enough resources will have been invested in viable alternatives by that time.

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Happy to see it get love and spread the word. alternativeto.net is my go to. Worthy of muscle memory. I’ve also found great options in the awesome lists on github. Especially awesome self-hosted if we’re talking software. I thought I remember an alternativeto-like site geared towards cli, but I couldn’t find it last time I looked. LMK if that rings a bell for anyone.

I had a similar change of heart years ago, watching a docu-series on PBS and realizing I wanted more of that content in the world. Even though you can stream PBS for about $5 a month, I canceled Netflix so I could pay PBS $20 a month to start making up for all the time my money was flowing in the wrong direction.

We’re likely to get more of the things we invest in, and less of the things we don’t. That investment includes attention in ad-driven market, not only money.

I know I’m not the first person on lemmy to have this realization, it’s one of the many reasons I like it here.

I’ve had audio sync issues on kodi myself-- specifically osmc on Vero V which is optimized for playback. I tried checking my notes, because it was some time ago. Nothing definitive, but it may have been related to a random crashing issue that turned out to be a bad hdmi port-- which was the last thing I considered checking after triple checking everything else. Anyway, good luck with the troubleshooting. Audio sync issues are a pain but I can also attest yt-dlp has been solid.

I’ve enjoyed Zim in the past but not being able to access it on mobile caused me to migrate. Do you have a way to access your notes on the go?