cobysev

I think it’s great for a ground-floor investment in a YouTube competitor. It draws more people to the platform, gets a chunk of money flowing up front to help boost the service, and they can always sunset the lifetime option if the site gets popular and revenue starts to get tight. As long as they continue to honor it for everyone who paid initially.

Like I said in my original comment, a Nebula subscription is only $6/mo. A lifetime access payment is over 4 years of subscriptions up front. That’s a nice chunk of change to help get them established.

I saw someone’s video about how Nebula works (I think Legal Eagle? He was advertising it hardcore on YouTube for a while) and the subscription service is how they pay content creators. He said it’s a more stable income than YouTube, where your videos earn advertising money based on trends and visibility. If you’re not YouTube famous (and the algorithm doesn’t make you visible), you’re not going to make any money on the platform. But Nebula gives you a more solid income, plus the freedom to make the content you want. No AI moderators flagging videos because it thought it detected the word “suicide” or something. No forcing you to include key words or pushing regular videos on a tight schedule to ensure the algorithm keeps recommending your channel.

Yeah, like I said, it needs more content creators to dump their libraries there. It could be a fantastic competitor to YouTube if only more people knew about it and used it.

Find me a self publishing video platform with the reach of YouTube that doesn’t require self hosting and I’ll happily move my content there.

Nebula is the next best thing to YouTube, but not enough content creators have moved their stuff there, so it’s easy to run out of interesting videos to watch after a while. Some of the bigger folks I follow share their content on both platforms, and the incentive to watch on Nebula instead of YouTube is that content creators have more freedom with their videos on Nebula. They can post bonus/extra footage that would be automatically flagged and blocked by YouTube normally. Don’t need to dance around the censors on Nebula.

Nebula is subscription-based, so they don’t show ads anywhere on their site. But if you don’t want to pay for another subscription service, you can also do a one-time payment to have lifetime access to their site. It’s $300, which is the cost of just over 4 years of their subscription service ($6/mo). Considering I’ve had an account for over 3 years now, it’s almost paid for itself.

I’m terrified of Gabe retiring or passing away. He’s been amazing for the company and I don’t trust anyone else to not want to use Valve for their own greedy purposes. The next president of Valve will likely ruin all the good things about it, thanks to late-stage capitalism.

I firmly believe in voting with your wallet; I normally don’t invest much long-term interest into businesses because you never know how they’ll change over time, but I’ve been so happy with Valve that I’ve gladly given them thousands of dollars over the decades for Steam games. My library is sitting at just over 3,500 games right now. I don’t know what I’m gonna do when Valve crumbles one day. I really hope they give me an option to download and play offline all the games I’ve bought, because that’s a massive library to lose.

I’ve never given a penny to Epic Games, and unless they get on-par with Steam’s functionality, I won’t ever buy or play any of their games. The one thing that might make Epic Games competitive (and could convince me to use their platform) is letting Steam users copy their libraries over, so we’re not just starting over from scratch with a new service.

That’s what got me on Steam in the first place. Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam’s store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library. That’s how I got my collection of early Call of Duty titles on Steam, as well as Half-Life and some others. I moved my physical game library over to Steam and I’ve been a Steam loyalist ever since.

AskJeeves and Hotbot! Man, that takes me back. I also enjoyed Excite and Infoseek back in the pre-Google days.

Proton’s top tier service for individuals (Proton Unlimited) is only $7.99/month if you pay for 2 years of service. Gives you full access to all their services.

Proton just announced last month that they’re turning the company into a nonprofit organization, because security is more important to them than making money. That’s why their services are dirt-cheap; they want to ensure it’s affordable for everyone, and the only reason they collect money at all is to keep the servers online.

I’m currently de-Googling my life. Moving all my services over to Proton, testing other search engines, etc. Trying to slowly cut out/replace all services that Google provides me.

Oh, and I’m sticking with Firefox with Ublock Origin, to ensure Google can’t ever advertise to me, even incidentally.

I knew a guy when I served in the US military who got caught cheating in a semi-related way. He got assigned to a base in a new state and his wife refused to relocate their whole family for the few years he’d be assigned there, so he went by himself, leaving his wife and kids in his home state.

Turns out, he was sexting one of his younger subordinates at work. One of his daughters found out when she tried to use an old tablet and found out his account was still synced to it. She saw all his texts updating in real time.

He was ultra-conservative and didn’t believe in divorce, so he was doing everything he could to save his marriage. His wife forced him to install security cameras in every room of his apartment and banned him from going anywhere after work. She knew his schedule and expected him home immediately after work ended. He was basically on house arrest until his job was done and he could move home.

The last I heard, he told his wife the landlord needed to paint the walls, so he removed all the cameras, dunked them in the bathtub, then played dumb when none of them would work when he set them back up again. He was seen inviting young women over to his apartment after that. So, you know… he didn’t learn his lesson.

I actually prefer Lemmy because it’s less active. I browse Lemmy’s version of r/All and I have more than enough content to keep me entertained for hours. Plus, when I find a popular thread, I can actually contribute to it and my comments aren’t buried under 10K other comments within a few hours. I feel like I can actually communicate with the community here, instead of shouting into the void like on Reddit.

That analogy doesn’t make sense. Volkswagen is a brand; PC is not. Every personal computer is, and always has been, a PC. That’s why we differentiate between desktop PCs and laptop/tablet PCs in the industry. Macs are a type of PC. I know this; I worked IT in the federal govt for 20 years and there’s is no name brand just called “PC.”

What you’re confusing for “PC” is specific name brands of PCs, with specific hardware. When they added PC to software designation back in the day, they were letting you know it was specifically for a personal computer; not a VHS, not a record, not a game cartridge, not a cassette tape, etc. That was the designation, and then there would be more details about what specific hardware/software was required to use it. (e.g. Windows 95 with 512 MB RAM, at least a Pentium III processor, etc.)

When Apple started marketing their PCs, they built their own unique system that wasn’t compatible with other PCs, so they started pushing the Mac vs. PC campaign to separate their equipment from the rest, which eventually culminated in those Mac vs. PC ads many years later. Products started receiving a Mac label instead of PC, to show that they wouldn’t be compatible with the rest of the PCs on the market.

It helped that the rest of the PC industry started standardizing their equipment, to be compatible across all systems. Macs stood out from the rest, by refusing to be compatible with other PCs and forcing their users to stick exclusively with Apple products. It was a very anti-competitive practice, preventing users from sharing across systems, and one of many reasons the federal govt never went with Apple computers; we need to be able to share data with a variety of systems across the globe.

But Macs still fall under the umbrella of a personal computer. They are PCs. Even if they prefer no one calls them that.

On a side note, the EU just forced Apple to standardize their cables to USB-C, so they’re getting rid of their Lightning cables and finally joining the rest of the world in cable standardization. But they’ll fight tooth and nail to prevent any other changes. They’re still fighting against Right to Repair laws, as they want to force you to return to them directly for any maintenance.

As an IT guy in the early 2000s, it was really annoying to see all the “Mac vs. PC” arguments. PC stands for Personal Computer - a Mac is literally a PC! When I was a kid in the '80s-'90s, my schools all used Apple IIe computers (and later versions of Apple products as I got older), but they always called them PCs.

But those Apple ads convincing people to ditch the frumpy old guy PC for the young, hot Mac guy did their job, and pop culture decided that a Mac wasn’t a PC.

I like the changes, it’s working very well!

One thing that still bothers me is webm links. They show as gifs on posts, but when I click on them, they’ll give me a display saying something like, “Image was actually a webpage! Open in browser?” Is it possible to have them play in the app like gifs, or do I just need to open them separately in a browser every time? I don’t want to leave the app just to view a 5-second webm.

Thanks for all you’re doing!

That’s what the founders of Reddit believed when they started. We all jumped ship from Digg because Digg became too corporate and greedy, and Reddit was our safe haven.

Now here we are, over a decade later, and we’re jumping ship again because Reddit has become too corporate and greedy.

Lemmy has the advantage of being decentralized, with no single person or corporation running it, and you’re proposing a Reddit clone, run by an individual? Honestly, I love the ideas you have for Matrix, I love what you’ve accomplished with it, and I love your optimism for the site. But I’ve been burned too many times in the past by hopeful honest innovators who let money and power slowly corrupt them over time. Unless you can add your site to the federation, I’m gonna have to pass, even as enticing as your site looks now. I’m too jaded to trust a single entity/corporation to host social media content.

I saw this post way back in September last year (which was quickly removed), and have been seeing this guy’s custom name popping up everywhere since. It’s very annoying. I’m all for blocking custom characters in display names.

come on we all go to reddit when we need to find some information because its almost always guaranteed to be there

Most of us dumped Reddit when third party apps went away. I personally haven’t been back to Reddit since creating a Lemmy account. Screw that place; they don’t deserve my patronage anymore. Or anyone’s, for that matter. Continuing to use their content is justifying their shitty business practices. It’ll never get better if people keep enabling it.

Also, what specific info are you searching for that Reddit can provide? Their search function has always been garbage. Or are you referring to general content and/or subs that don’t have an active userbase here yet?

I’ve been using Nebula. It’s a subscription-based alternative with no advertising, but I get it for free because I’m subscribed to Curiosity Stream (which is basically Netflix, but for documentaries).

The only downside to Nebula is that there aren’t a lot of content creators on it, so you don’t have the variety of videos that YouTube offers.

I’ve heard communities on Lemmy, magazines on kbin, and a lot of expats from Reddit like to call them subs.

I used WordPad back in the Windows 95 days, then never again.

As long as Notepad doesn’t go away though, I’m good. I use that all the time.