Selfhosted

I mean... that IS how restaurants work. If people don't order the fish of the day then they buy fewer and fewer fishes until it is no longer a thing. Even the speed people eat DOES matter since restaraunts tend to be designed around each customer spending a certain amount of time dining. Too short and they will never order a dessert. Too long and they are costing you money while they nurse that coffee.

And similar happens with even buying blu-rays. If nobody bought Master and Commander in 4k then you can be sure that experiment would be over. Instead? That thing sold like toiler paper during COVID and we'll likely see more "prestige" releases with a huge dose of FOMO.

As for up fronts versus long tails? Guess what is motivating all those revivals "nobody asked for"?

Don't get me wrong. I vastly prefer to rip blu rays to my NAS and watch via plex. But the idea that you are somehow no longer part of the marketing cycle is just... wrong.

Side note, the restaurant analogy is exactly why I hate the seemingly American style of service where the waiter asks how the food is halfway through.

I guess that's a good analogy for how creepy surveillance capitalism is, it's like a waiter judging and recording your every move and reaction throughout the entire meal.

exactly this. i say PIR - Private Information Retrieval

offline everything, no middlehands

condition "the industry" as these are called to change the RND departement - live without dependency on fuckers

What's your take on scrobble services?

I don't like that one monopoly company gets all the data and abuses the system with it even further.

I mean, forever might be too strong of a word.

Everything is homogenized now

I'm interested to know what you mean by this, because if anything, I've heard the older generations reminisce about ye olde monoculture when there was only a handful of good shows on a handful of television channels, and everyone would tune in weekly to watch and then talk about the next day around the water cooler. I feel like streaming has led to things being more fragmented, both because you need to be subscribed to the one service that carries the show and because there's so many more shows being made.

I miss the days of people having their own bespoke collection of their favorite movies and shows

I don't miss the shelves to house all of it tho. Now, I have quite a collection of audio from my days of internet radio, that I ripped to flac a long time ago All of it sets on my shelf as a NAS.

yeah okay well your watchparties are increasingly going to get worse until you too hit your threshold: such is the business.

the rest of the world uses a VPN like MullvadVPN and qBittorrent to "digitally back up media we've already bought". without ads, in better quality, without telemetry, without serfdom-subscriptions. you may like AI offloading your decisionmaking, but keep doing it and you will be codependent on authority for choosing anything in life. what do you want in a cozy moment away from work? it frustrates me to read people are too anxioys to begin to do otherwise and accept the way things are. that's a rant in return

have a nice day, i won't make this into a chain of replies.

You have to be really careful trying to buy physical copies nowadays, too, since bootlegs are absolutely everywhere. Especially on Ebay.

This is why the seedbox SaaS market exists. Providing turn key hosted solutions, the only heavy lifting is the configuration which takes some reading to understand.

Check out the Servarr Wiki, Ombi, Syncthing as a starting point for media discovery and curration tooling.

Steam attempted to distribute movies between 2014 and 2019.
GOG gave up at the beginning of 2025.

So bizarrely the best experience is to self host and pirate. That's what you get when the entire entertainment industry is hostile to consumers.

When Netflix first became big, it was popular because it was a one-stop shop for almost all your content. It was like a big library of content in one place, you pay a reasonable monthly fee and it's all there. Piracy dipped as a result.

Now all the content is fragmented into numerous walled gardens you have to pay separate fees to access. People can only consume the same amount but now they have to pay 4 or 5 fees as the content is spread out.

Unsurprisingly piracy is booming again.

If you like her check out “Bread on Penguins” too. She was suggested to me because I watch Veronica and I really dig the way she does her videos too. She’s the complete opposite of the mainstream YouTubers and just a nice person who really enjoys Linux and making videos.

KEXP (a radio station and also online+YouTube) has opened my eyes to so many new artists. And also bandcamp has a very interesting related artists kinda feature

Used to be we would share mixtapes.. I really miss that. It was an intimate social interaction that we've entirely lost with modern streaming.

Bandcamp? Listenbrainz? Last.fm?

Aside from similar artists, I scrobble to Listenbrainz, which gives recommendations from similar artists and similar listeners.

Not by reading pitchfork or rolling stone. Those are only for people who hate music.

Back in the aughts I would find bands because they were an opener for another band I was seeing.

NPR's tiny desk

asking your friends and aquantances

listening to dj sets

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