Paying money to download content I’ve already paid for?

What about Linux distribution repos? (in terms of where they fall in the known/unknown category)

Yes I’m aware of that, I assumed that a site recommended on here would have that as a main feature otherwise it’s not much use for archiving. I already tried yt-dlp and it doesn’t seem to be supported.

There doesn’t seem to be any way of saving videos there, am I missing something?

I can confirm it’s greatly improved in terms of reliability in the last couple of years.

How to install adblockers, how to detect fake download sites that give you computer aids? Show them how to use a VPN and choosing the right one (a true pirate must always choose a VPN with port forwarding capabilities, so you can still seed) I feel like this is all valuable info we all learned as pirates the hard way, and valuable information to pass on to our kids.

Absolutely, I would say whether you’re teaching piracy or not, those are essential things that everyone online must know about; it would be unethical to allow your kids to go online without that protection.

Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.

No, I’m not having that! That’s rewriting of history. I remember when Google came out, it was pretty much as good as Altavista and no more. It had the additional appeal that it looked (for the time) unique and fresh and had a weird name, I remember getting my friends to try this “weird new search engine that might someday beat Altavista” but it never revolutionised anything in terms of search results at the time.

Also Altavista was not getting progressively worse, I still remember the days when you could type a simple dictionary word into a search engine and have it return 0 results. Altavista is what changed that, not Google.

As much as I try to encourage alternatives, most people where I’m from use WhatsApp for everything these days and has been that way for the last ~5 years. I might get about 10 SMS messages a year but possibly thousands of WhatsApp messages.

It’s definitely a nicer experience around here if you block certain instances, I won’t mention names myself. The difference is that Meta’s instance is big enough to completely drown out everyone else which can’t be said about the above.

There’s a good argument for keeping it small and focused. Massive all-encompassing social networks are relatively new and not a good thing in my opinion.

My concern is that the toxic culture from Meta’s platforms will be imported here, and the only way to get away from it would be to not only defederate from Meta but to defederate from anything federated to Meta (essentially creating two fediverses). I hope it doesn’t come to that, but that’s my worry.

I want to be a good enough friend to encourage my friends to stay away from Meta. I don’t want to enable them.

Lemmy users be like „I fucking love decentralized freedom“, until someone joins they don’t like.

No, especially when someone joins that we don’t like. The ability to defederate is the freedom that comes with decentralisation. If there were no bad actors decentralisation wouldn’t be so important.

For me it’s preparing for future nostalgia, I want to be able to just "have it’ to look back on. It may sound strange to some people I guess but I can’t properly get “invested” in a show/movie/game without the knowledge that I’ll be able to rewatch it again, maybe at some point when I’m in my 80s and feel nostalgic about it. It’s a major barrier to my enjoyment in the present. It’s like why people take photos of things. 99% of what I would torrent are things I have access to now, that I would happily pay through the nose for if I could just own it in a DRM-free format.

Fair, and if I was a little harsh there I apologise. It’s not a thing, and in absence of that the best thing to use is Mastodon which while doesn’t provide recommendations the way you want but at least doesn’t provide recommendations that are biased against your interests.

You want a corporate entity to recommend things to you based on a closed algorithm you have no control over?

Each to their own and I know a lot of people do it, but that’s really weird to me, absolutely crazy.

In any case, it’s open source so you could probably hire someone to develop that for you if you really wanted. You know, have it serve things up to you that manipulates you to stay on the platform while best aligning with their corporate interests. You do you.