I’m currently using a 2008 hard drive and i really hope it has some life left in it because i haven’t backed up the contents yet

Since 2010 i’ve made three Facebook accounts, deleted one and never use the other two. Active users would be a more useful metric.

It’s been commented on before that, for its size, Twitter has a disproportionate influence not just on the internet but even on politics. This is still the case today because no good alternatives have emerged for the mainstream yet.

Shifting the power from a CEO to an instance admin is a massive improvement.

One has autocratic control over the entire site, potentially hundreds of millions of users, investors breathing down their neck, server infrastructure, and other systemic pressures; meanwhile, a fediverse instance admin has autocratic control over nothing but their own instance, a few thousand users at most, with the only money and hardware involved being their own.

The fediverse is incredibly more horizontal and decentralized than any corporate social media, the improvement is massive. And i’m a believer that vertical structures and concentrations of power are at the root of a lot of problems in society, so this is gravy to me.

But yes, it’s worth remembering that it’s not completely decentralized, and admins still have absolute power over their instance. My Mastodon instance admin doesn’t want us to use the name GIMP to refer to the open source image manipulator; they say “gimp” is a slur aimed at disabled people, which i’ve never heard before in my life.

One guy had geo-IP banning because they believe everyone who is from these coutnries list is an idiot who doesn’t know how to use Soulseek.

You think they told me that? No, they messaged me to tell me everyone from [insert country] was poor and ignorant, refused to explain, acted like it was obvious and i was stupid for not already knowing, judged me for using public torrent trackers; and when i called them arrogant, they said (this is almost a direct quote) “i’m not arrogant, i’m just better than you”.

In their defense, i was sharing the Incomplete folder.

I’ve been subscribed to Nebula since maybe not day one but day two or three. Good place

Someone just downloaded the entire discography of A Flock of Seagulls, but not the .mp3 files, just the images. Like the front covers and such.

what

This one in particular is Fantastic Planet. I also have Les Maitres de Temps

I think when they say ‘illegal content’ they mean, like, drugs and terrorism. Piracy probably ranks pretty low on the list.

Now yes the definition of piracy technically fits in the definition of ‘illegal content’, but just because two definitions intersect doesn’t mean you will get the logical consequences. The word of the rules is one thing, the rules in practice is another, so i think you can get away with a lot regardless of instance.

Besides, do the rules apply to the instance where you have your account, or to the instance where you’re posting/commenting? I genuinely don’t know

I’ve torrented for years, but i’m trying to diversify. Soulseek works perfectly except my VPN makes it hard for people to download from me, and i’m currently trying to get eMule community version to work but it’s giving me a few bugs. So haven’t had the best results so far

Yeah, FOSS alternatives are good nowadays so i mostly use them.

However recently i needed Adobe Illustrator, and i sat there looking at the free trial page wondering if i was really going to send my credit card to Adobe on the pinky promise that they weren’t going to charge me. So i decided to pirate, and what do you know, that’s also absurdly good nowadays.

And by the way, i found what i needed from the r/piracy wiki. We need like a megathread of recommendations, like if you need to crack Photoshop here’s where to get it, that kinda thing

We have a limited ability to freely discuss piracy on mainstream social media, which Reddit now regrettably is. IMO piracy communities can probably only exist in decentralized social media anymore.

I’ve been torrenting for years, recently discovered Soulseek. This is the first time i’m hearing about sonarr and radarr.

I’ve enjoyed MozillaVPN because it’s made by Mozilla.

And, honestly, not really any other reason, i just trust the company that makes it over the others. In fact, it has a significant downside in that it doesn’t have an app kill switch like NordVPN, so your torrent app can keep running unprotected.