I don’t think they have the ux advantage that their wealth suggests due to misaligned incentives. A good portion of their investment is getting users to see as many ads as they will tolerate. Try to modify any privacy settings, for example, and the ux is as garbage as amazon.

Fediverse and self hosted, open source alternatives are still relatively new. Folks have to expect some turbulence. As things grow and more bug reports and contributions can be made, the ux could be superior because they can give users what they want instead of maximizing monetization.

Misskey is a federated facebook alternative I heard about on mastodon recently. I’m not too familiar with it myself, but seems worth mentioning.

It has a “groups” feature that might avoid the “instance per person” lemmy workaround you were thinking about. According to this comparison misskey doesn’t have a like button, but a few of its forks do. Not sure about the upload experience; may depend on the app. I didn’t see any clients listed on their site but did a quick search for an iOS app, which exists, so i assume android, too.

Sorry I don’t have more info, but I hope that’s useful. Best of luck! I’ll be looking for a similar solution in the near future.

Idk what your feed looks like but if it’s like mine-- posts hyping ai juxtaposed with posts from artists that are (rightfully) upset that their work is being used without their consent to train generative ai in a push to replace artists or devalue their work-- linkedin can feel pretty dire and soul sucking.

Well said and a core concept people need to understand to appreciate data privacy/sovereignty. Simply calling it data overlooks what it often is: your behavior over time. We don’t call it PII but few things are more personally identifying.

I was surprised by a recent, popular comment here on lemmy where someone advised against using cash because of missing out on rewards. A majority of people don’t appreciate the tradeoffs here. By default, banks and private companies have more info on us than we have on ourselves. To think that they’re going to do anything that benefits us more than them is naive. While not everything is zero sum, we are talking about extractive, profit seeking industries.

Cash seems like the best defense on this front. I recent switched back to cash, and continue to track my own finances; Bank sees $500 withdrawal; I see $34.45 at grocery store, $19.20 at hardware store, etc.

Pro tip: try random but memorable phone numbers at checkout. Now you can enjoy the savings, and salt/contaminate the data extraction of others. The more randomness (where and when you shop, what you buy, which numbers you use) the better.

All the metadata perhaps (still very valuable), but client-side, zero-access encryption means it’s encrypted before it hits the servers. So while a data leak might, for example, show who, when, and how much you’re emailing, it wouldn’t show the content of the email as gmail would.

Moving in the direction of better and voting with your dollars is an important step away from already enshittified structures, which I’d argue, are inherent to certain models and not others. EG: a self hosted, open source software developed by a non-profit could sell and incorporate and enshittify, but the possibility of forking is an effective disincentive that could easily eat projected gains.

Wait and hope. I’ve long struggled with suicidal ideation, and I continue to work on it. I don’t know you and I know you’re not asking for for suggestions, but I can’t see someone else struggling this way and say nothing.

The economic system is fucked, so fitting in is not necessarily a good thing. “It’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” I know there are real financial pressures and struggles, I don’t mean to minimize that, but thinking “I will participate as little as necessary” instead of “I’m not doing well at their game” has helped me find a sense of worth outside “success.” Without you our team gets smaller. I think there are a lot of us, we just haven’t had great ways to organize, but I see even being able to connect here on lemmy as a reason to hope.

As for what to do, doing nothing is better than doing something in an unjust system. Some of the things that have helped me: going to the library and walking the isles looking subjects that interest you (while we’re on the subject, might I recommend “How to do Nothing” by Jenny Odell); Finding a natural space or park that you can go for a quiet walk; Working on personal projects, drawing, writing, etc which can come from and feed into time at the library.

I hope I’m not overstepping my bounds. I know when you’re feeling hopeless, suggestions can feel like a condescending nuisance. I hope this is not that. I hope you hang on. We need more people who can see this is bullshit.

To add another layer: allowing homelessness is one of the most widespread and visible acts of violence perpetrated by the state, supported by the market, and accepted-- or at least tolerated-- by most of the public. I wonder if institutions don’t address it because scares people into obedience.

Reflect on the focus of violence in stories about slavery. Hypothetically, without violence, slavery is still awful: robbing a human of their autonomy, spending their lives bettering the lot of those in power rather than their own. But we focus on the violence, not only because of the obvious, visible horror, but because you can’t rob someone of their autonomy without violence.

When it comes to homelessness, the violent act is not only inaction: failing to address risks and pitfalls, or add safety nets (focusing on growth, instead), but also what your original post is about: removing public facilities, forcing people to play the line-go-up game in order to have nice things, lest they have a string of bad luck and end up on the street, exposed to the elements.

The state and market didn’t cause the blizzard that may kill unhoused people, but they did nothing to try to get them out of its path. Isn’t that the purpose of these institutions? Yet homelessness is everywhere and it makes being unemployed all the more terrifying-- to be that much closer to the streets. “Better to take what you can get,” participate in an unjust market or it could be you.

I know it has a cult following, but in case there are others who are like me: I had hard time getting into King of the Hill when it aired. I’m really glad I gave it another shot. Most episodes are solid with great character moments, and a handful are right up there with the best of Simpsons and Futurama.

Side note: the game “Baba is you” was named after this effect, and features a character named kiki.

From my research, Patreon takes a smaller cut than YouTube Premium. Comparing YouTube Premium to its own ad model is a “Worst Negates the Bad” fallacy. From what I gathered (not easy to find and has changed over time) YT takes 30% from the former and 45% from latter. Seems insanely high. More than taxes. May be why so many creators need sponsors and hawk merch.

YouTube never supporting 3rd party apps seems like a negative.

Lots of suitable alternatives to youtube: read a book, listen to music, go for a walk, hang with friends, play games, etc, but to your point, sounds like a monopoly. Their search was once great, then ubiquitous, now terrible. YouTube Premium is just in the “entice users and creators” phase of its inevitable enshittification.

Don’t mean to dump on something you like, just disagree with the reasoning. If you’re not fine with Premium and hate giving money to google, sounds like you’ll eventually seek out alternatives when they go into profit maximization mode. Hopefully enough resources will have been invested in viable alternatives by that time.

[edit: break wall of text]

Happy to see it get love and spread the word. alternativeto.net is my go to. Worthy of muscle memory. I’ve also found great options in the awesome lists on github. Especially awesome self-hosted if we’re talking software. I thought I remember an alternativeto-like site geared towards cli, but I couldn’t find it last time I looked. LMK if that rings a bell for anyone.

I had a similar change of heart years ago, watching a docu-series on PBS and realizing I wanted more of that content in the world. Even though you can stream PBS for about $5 a month, I canceled Netflix so I could pay PBS $20 a month to start making up for all the time my money was flowing in the wrong direction.

We’re likely to get more of the things we invest in, and less of the things we don’t. That investment includes attention in ad-driven market, not only money.

I know I’m not the first person on lemmy to have this realization, it’s one of the many reasons I like it here.

I’ve had audio sync issues on kodi myself-- specifically osmc on Vero V which is optimized for playback. I tried checking my notes, because it was some time ago. Nothing definitive, but it may have been related to a random crashing issue that turned out to be a bad hdmi port-- which was the last thing I considered checking after triple checking everything else. Anyway, good luck with the troubleshooting. Audio sync issues are a pain but I can also attest yt-dlp has been solid.

downvotes? I’m guessing you may have offended some folks by badmouthing their favorite toy.

I’ve enjoyed Zim in the past but not being able to access it on mobile caused me to migrate. Do you have a way to access your notes on the go?