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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • The dirty secret that nobody wants to talk about. Sometimes, stuff equals capability. This is especially true with tools, renovation supplies, and hobby supplies. That old drain snake in the garage? $350 plumber call. Rarely used winter gear in a closet? No $$$ rental on the occasional ski vacation. Sewing machine and supplies? Now you can alter or repair your clothes.

    It can also be resiliency. All those extra Christmas candles? Great for a power outage during hurricane season. Buying, preserving, and storing summer produce can save money later in the year. A deep pantry can be a critical safety net for some people with job insecurity.

    Of course, there’s still a lot of crap we can get rid of, like old hand-me-downs and things we’ll never use.

    It’s really a balancing act between the cost of maintaining capability and the cost of paying for outside services. For me, I basically add an entire room to my house for $150 a month, and still get to keep the ability to do the things I love and have some resiliency in my life.






  • That’s a great article, I strongly agree.

    I feel like copyright hurts competition and creativity by letting publishers and studios put out a relatively small number of successful works, and then ride that success for years.

    If copyright terms were much shorter with no provision for renewal, it would spur a lot of creativity and competition between studios and publishers because they would effectively be forced to keep coming out with new, high quality content in order to stay relevant.


  • For our generation, sure, but there’s an entire generation of internet users that have never known a world without streaming services, and never got in to physical media, archived media, or piracy. A lot of them grew up with mobile devices only and hardly ever used desktop or laptop computers.

    I was talking to some of my younger coworkers about music the other day. I mentioned something about the hundreds of gigabytes of music, all in FLAC, ALAC, and high quality mp3, and the question I got was “why? Why not just use spotify/Apple Music?” Well what happens when music from your favorite artist gets taken down because it wasn’t profitable? What happens when your favorite show gets cancelled and pulled because it wasn’t profitable?

    So much data would have been flat out gone without piracy.




  • Lemmy reminds me a lot of the way the internet used to be- smaller, independent communities with more real engagement and less of a content firehose. With so many instances, if you want something, you have to seek it out or start it yourself- with the added benefit of federation keeping everyone connected.

    I’m really optimistic that this will get critical mass. I think the concept of federation is great, and I like to think we’re at the forefront of a whole new phase of online community.