greenskye

I think it’s one thing to not be willing to go live as a hermit to avoid unethical consumption and another thing to simply… not participate in rent seeking behavior like this.

I feel like Linux works for hardcore users and extremely casual users, but it doesn’t work that great for medium savvy users.

Like sure if I’m barely using the computer for anything other than a web browser then it’ll work fine.

And if I’m willing to do a whole lot of research I can also make it work for power user setups (at an even better outcome than Windows).

But if I’m just a gamer who’s smart enough to do some modding and run a couple of game servers and maybe some other utilities, but I’m not incredibly tech savvy otherwise? Not a great fit.

The fediverse lacks basically all of my niche communities and the ones that exist have zero engagement. I’m basically only on Lemmy at this point for political stuff. Politics anything is a shitshow on Reddit, but seems decent on Lemmy. But that’s just really not enough.

Though to be fair, Reddit’s ‘suggested’ posts feature is I believe destroying niche communities on Reddit these days, so I’m not sure how much longer those will keep working for me either. Moving away from explicit subscriptions and turning your home feed into just a lesser version of /r/all is a good way to ruin most communities over time I think. I feel eventually Reddit will just become Facebook for millennials where your feed is completely divorced from anything you might actually want to see and is entirely an algorithm instead.

Somewhere along the way we built a system that doesn’t actually require you to do or make anything. And that’s been absolutely horrible.

Several adult friendly platforms have come and gone. Many of them very profitable and self sustaining. They all eventually get screwed by inability to process payments.

And when people try to create their own payment methods not subject to arbitrary morality rules, the full weight of the existing banking system comes down hard and strangles them in the cradle.

We could absolutely have safe, profitable, self sustaining adult friendly spaces, but the powers that be don’t want that to exist and work hard to undermine that from every possible angle.

It’s really no different than all those efforts to ban local fiber ISP coops or how abortion clinics get shut down by arbitrary full hospital regulations because they couldn’t ban them legally.

Piracy is somewhat similar to vigilantism to me. My ability to consider it a negative is directly related to how fair I consider the legitimate methods available to be.

If similar efforts were focused on consumer protection laws as we do IP protection, I don’t think pirates would have much leg to stand on, and they’d be seen in more of a negative light.

But since consumers are regularly fucked by corporations, all I see is two sides both doing bad shit and I’m not feeling all that charitable for the faceless megacorp. I also dislike pirates who pirate from small time creators. But that’s about as far as I can care given the state of things.

We should be focusing on stronger consumer rights to truly fix the problem for all sides.