7 ms·

There are so many advantages to turning off and disconnecting these days. Avoiding TOS is just a small part. There are too many demands on our attention and ou

by shirro 7mo ago

There are so many advantages to turning off and disconnecting these days. Avoiding TOS is just a small part. There are too many demands on our attention and our wallets and most of us aren't getting more money or time. I cancelled all the family's streaming services in 2025. Everyone adapted. It turns out a lot of things we are told we need, we really don't. People lived without them as recently as a few years ago. A lot of the novelty of mobile, streaming, social media and weird tech nobody needs has worn off and the value has been eroded. There are so many better things to do and experience and you don't need to hand over your privacy or sign your soul away.

Forgeties79 7mo ago
I canceled all of our subscriptions about two years ago and set up a Plex server. I don’t love the direction Plex is going in so I’m teeing up to flip to Jellyfin, but still, it has been so much better than dealing with all of these companies and nonsense. I feel like we can’t even call it “advertising“ anymore. It’s such a misnomer. It’s basically data fracking and psychological warfare to make us all into little addicts. This whole industry built around chasing “the attention economy” is a social blight.
- Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
  Jellyfin is nice but I could never understand how to setup when all I wanted was to watch videos from server for example. So I used copyparty[0] and used VLC and set a username and password. I recommend copyparty if you just want something quick and easy actually. Just try it out on cheap VPS and just run it and forget it. https://github.com/9001/copyparty https://github.com/9001/copyparty
  - Forgeties79 7mo ago
    The big thing is being able to stream outside of my home network. Running stuff locally is easy enough with basically any system luckily
    - Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
      Yes but you can actually have Copyparty run as a server similar to Jellyfin and have the same thing too? Am I missing something that I am not looking at? But won't jellyfin have the same issue, I think that plex has servers that you can connect from outside but the GP wanted to move to jellyfin and I was talking about that. And, you can even have plex like thing by just having Cloudflare Tunnels/Tailscale + Copyparty too.
  - RiverCrochet 7mo ago
    Jellyfin isn't a simple viewer over a filesystem, you have to make a library and give it folders to ingest. It enforces an artist-album-track structure of media, so if you don't like that structure you'll be fighting Jellyfin more than using it.
- cityzen 7mo ago
  I had a lot of issues with plex on Apple TV and switched to Infuse. I haven’t tried jellyfin but figured I would mention it.
  - Forgeties79 7mo ago
    Huh that’s surprising. So fer Plex has run on everything I’ve ever encountered
- dpoloncsak 7mo ago
  Similar boat...I'd also like to swap off Plex but a few of my less techie friends use it and I'm worried about the compatibility/ease of setup of Jellyfin on their devices. Thought about running both in parallel but that seems like a waste. Think I just need a migration day eventually
  - Forgeties79 7mo ago
    Yeah nothing is as turnkey as plex, hard to give that up if you’re running a little streaming service for friends and family haha
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    Jellyfin has been fine "around the house" but I don't know about remote access as I've not needed it. Jellyfin + Infuse + AppleTV is basically bulletproof; however Swiftfin as a client has been working fine.
  - devilbunny 7mo ago
    I've never run Plex, or Jellyfin for that matter. There's a video share on my NAS. I point Infuse on Apple TV 4K's at it. It works, and cleanly. Downsides: you have to pay for Infuse Pro to play some formats and deal with some audio codecs. It's IIRC $17 for a year, though, so pretty reasonable for continued development. Your non-technical friends and family can't do the initial setup themselves (it's shared over Tailscale, they can all use the same limited account on your plan), but anyone I'm going to let do this can ship me their Apple TV 4K and let me set it up for them.
    - darkhorse222 7mo ago
      It's just weird that it's this complicated. We should get a static IP from our DNS. We should use standard open source streaming conversion mechanisms. It should go over basic video codecs. Lately I've been working towards just using a webserver to host video files. Sure, it's not adaptive, but for goodness sakes it's simple.
      - 7mo ago
juleiie 7mo ago
I don’t live in US or five eyes so I pirate all the stuff basically Scot free. I understand that it’s not so easy for Americans whose internet activity is constantly scrutinized. I’ve had the privilege of choosing exactly who and what I pay. I usually don’t subscribe to any streaming service, but when I do choose to pay for something, my money goes to smaller entities that I don’t actively want to see fail. In my book, none of the Hollywood deserves a single cent. It’s an amazing feeling to be in the power to dictate this.
- 05 7mo ago
  Surely even the poorest of Americans can pay a couple bux a month for a seedbox?
  - juleiie 7mo ago
    This is a good question. If it is so cheap and easy then why not? I think it is a matter of american government and corporate terror tactic. They make these few rare cases when they catch somebody so loud and showy that the rest of the flock prefers to sign all the TOS and don’t have this additional worry. It is a success story of manipulative scare techniques that copyright corpos mastered. Most people prefer to be civilians than to be anti corporate combatants, even if it is perfectly safe in practice. This is normal.
  - arvid-lind 7mo ago
    The way I see it, you can get a top tier VPN (mullvad) and a seedbox for the cost of one streaming service per month.
  - dfedbeef 7mo ago
    Surely these tent dwellers have a few dollars a month for streaming content
- dfc 7mo ago
  If you think Hollywood content is worthless why bother pirating it at all? It seems like you would just not consume it.
everdrive 7mo ago
Every single ToS is written to benefit the company, and when necessary, harm the consumer. The answer is to enter into as few service contracts as possible. Use open source software. Control when your software updates. Really, never use the cloud version of anything whatsoever except where unavoidable. (eg: email and such) They feel like the legal equivalent of Calvin Ball. So long as you just stash it in a ToS, you can apply any stupid rule your lawyers can imagine.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 7mo ago
  >The answer is to enter into as few service contracts as possible. Any contract where the other party performs so little seeking of my agreement (none at all really) that no representative talks to me in person or even electronically in an individual capacity, where no one witnesses me put my mark on the paper or hears by verbal assent, is in fact no contract at all. Despite what the courts may say. Should they say otherwise, they're wholly illegitimate. That any of you have let something else stand as the norm is bizarre and alarming. Contracts require explicit, sought agreement, by their very definition. Nothing can be implied. If their business model relies on implicit agreement because anything else would be too difficult, then they simply shouldn't be allowed to remain in business.
  - seabass-labrax 7mo ago
    Isn't that a bit extreme? As a counterpoint, I find it useful to be able to pay for a train journey by tapping my card on an electronic reader - no representative of the company is there or otherwise witnesses me doing so - but I have entered into a contract whereby I am entitled to travel to a distant location. And I do want it to be a contract, because the transport company agrees to get me to my destination somehow even if the trains are cancelled. Perhaps the conditions of carriage may be somehow unsatisfactory to me, but the way in which I enter into the contract is almost entirely unrelated.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 7mo ago
      >but I have entered into a contract whereby I am entitled to travel to a distant location. I'm not sure why you drape this in the clothing of "legal contract". If the train fails to take you to your destination, they certainly aren't in breach. It seems really one-sided. Why do they need it to be a contract? Will you come and claw back the fare from them with them having no legal recourse?
datsci_est_2015 7mo ago
This ruling taken in conjunction with “in the future you will own nothing, and you will be happy” paints quite the dystopian picture where not even “turning off and disconnecting” will save you.
- mghackerlady 7mo ago
  the way we're headed (and largely already are) "turning off and disconnecting" will be a privilege of the rich and dream of the stubborn
  - datsci_est_2015 7mo ago
    Indeed. “Privilege of the rich” could be the subtitle for the biography of America. Perhaps founded on the basis of rights for all men, but always denying or chipping away at those rights for the classes of labor. I’m always cheering for the farmers who are taking on John Deere for the right to repair.
blharr 7mo ago
Sure, but even the specific case isn't about TOS within the limits of screen time or online browsing. It's about tracking your physical location via Tile trackers. Sure, you can get off streaming services, but you're still signing a TOS or waiver by using any service. Meta/Google/etc has a profile on you even if you've never logged in based on others sharing their contacts and pictures that may include you.
- gruez 7mo ago
  >It's about tracking your physical location via Tile trackers. 1. If the complaint is about non-consensual tracking, using a gadget that's specifically designed and advertised for tracking, and that you have to specifically go out and buy and put on your body is a terrible example. 2. Tile trackers have more or less been replaced with airtags and whatever google's equivalent is, which is designed in such a way that prevents companies from knowing its actual location.
  - blharr 7mo ago
    It's a completely grotesque point you've got. Tiles are advertised as used for personally tracking your devices. To the average person its the same technology as a Bluetooth earbud. Not a device for tracking at a central whatever 100 companies want that data. And for 2... thats completely irrelevant. "More or less"? So... a hundred of millions of tiles still out there is "more or less"?
dfxm12 7mo ago
Counterpoint: fighting for consumer protections is a fight worth not avoiding. Interacting with some of these systems is simply unavoidable (think payment systems, health care portals, email, etc.) & larger corporations already enjoy a huge power imbalance in this relationship. We will just get run over further if we hide from it.
KellyCriterion 7mo ago
The only reason why I bought a smartphone (first time!) in 2013 was because everyone aronud me had one and they were asking for WhatsApp - util then I was fine with my 4-color-crap phone :-D (and I didnt even know what WhatsApp was)
- testing22321 7mo ago
  I don’t have one. Sure it’s inconvenient from time to time, but the positives far outweigh the negatives.
larodi 7mo ago
This news came as I was clicking unsubscribe to all the weird mails that somehow keep piling up in my inbox, with LinkedIN being the leader, and then some by bandcamp. More than ever I enjoy turning off the mobile data while on the go. Very soon I'll do another round terminating most subscriptions, as Goog showed me what happens otherwise - it still owes me these 500$ that somehow miraculously flew out of my ads account when a campaign decided to suddenly come to live and start converting into obsolete project like 2 months after its designated final date. Nobody ever came back to my complaints.
tedggh 7mo ago
As an avid reader and outdoors enthusiast, I feel there’s a lot of value on “wasting” time with a movie or limited series. Absolutely, there are so many better things to do and experience than watching TV, but no one should be stressing out about maximizing their time doing them. In fact, going against that mindset once in a while, and allowing yourself to not do the thing you think you should be doing, is an experience by itself. Also, it doesn’t need to be a complete waste of time. If you like history or art, there’s a lot of content both as fiction and non fiction that you would find intellectually stimulating (I highly recommend Criterion for this) One cold November night my wife picked a movie called Babette's Feast. I absolutely loved the photography. I did some research and found it was inspired by Danish painter Hammershoi, which I never heard of. For Christmas, my wife gave me a beautifully printed, limited edition of his work by the Jacquemart museum in Paris. Later this year we plan to make a stop in Copenhagen on our way to Sweden to visit friends, so we can see Hammershoi work at the museums.
- hirvi74 7mo ago
  > allowing yourself to not do the thing you think you should be doing, is an experience by itself. In my life, I have a term for that. It's called everyday.
- darkhorse222 7mo ago
  Wasted time should not be defined as unproductive time, it should be time you did not experience, time you were completely clocked out, not even enjoyed, not relaxed or relished. Wasted. It is a subtle difference but critical to remember if you want to reclaim your time rather than claiming it for capitalism.
- ericmcer 7mo ago
  Seriously you can have a very pure experience interacting with media. I did a mushroom trip ~5 years ago and was having a not great time walking around outside. Cars, other people, sun, bugs etc. were all not sitting right. I went home and watched "Life in Colour", an Attenborough documentary about amazing uses of color in animals. It was a top experience and I still remember scenes from it years later. Anyway don't throw the baby out with the bathwater and all that, there is a reason we developed digital entertainment.
tzs 7mo ago
> It turns out a lot of things we are told we need, we really don't. People lived without them as recently as a few years ago. It also often turns out that when some new way comes along to do something that people like to do, the ways they used to do those things go away. If you don't like the new way you can't go back to how it used to be done. The last physical media video rental store within a reasonable drive of me closed around 8 years ago. Redbox went away in 2024. There is still rental by mail, but that is slow. Those who liked being able to be able to rent a movie without planning days ahead are stuck with streaming now. Another example is cell phones. It used to be that there were pay phones all over the place. Nearly every public place had a payphone nearby. In most cities there was a good chance there was a street payphone on every block, and nearly every restaurant and gas station had one. On freeways there were call boxes to summon help. Pay phones peaked in the US in 1995. When cell phones went mainstream in the early to mid 2000s, pay phones rapidly went away, and in about 10 years were almost all gone. Around 90% of freeway call boxes also disappeared. They now are mostly only in areas with poor cellular coverage. If you want to be able to make calls while out and about now doing it the way it was done before cell phones quite likely is not feasible.
- pests 7mo ago
  While not exactly the same as freeway call boxes... pretty much every state requires any business that are listed on the food/gas/hotel/recreation signs for off ramps to have a free phone for public use.
- darkhorse222 7mo ago
  Perhaps this makes a very big difference to you, but I often have to remind myself that iTunes movie rentals are very much alive and function just as they do some ten years ago. No subscription required. Not physical, sure, but a normal rental experience. Though I do miss old Netflix. That was fun.
- jgwil2 7mo ago
  > Those who liked being able to be able to rent a movie without planning days ahead are stuck with streaming now. Just want to point out that public libraries often have great DVD collections (also music, games, and more) and are often underutilized. Definitely still a viable way to watch a movie for many folks.
javier2 7mo ago
Is there some place I can still buy TV shows or movies? Preferably DRM free
- pocksuppet 7mo ago
  Doubtful, but there are [redacted to comply with the rules]
  - javier2 7mo ago
    the what?
- c0balt 7mo ago
  You can try to buy physical media. A surprising amount of shows and movies are still published as Blu-rays. The release there is usually a bit delayed to streaming releases though and will set you back more if you buy it new. The used market can be your friend here, especially for older media. IME local libraries might also have quite a good offering depending on their funding and priorities. The clear downside here is that you can't really follow along with others though (if that's your jam) as these releases are mostly in-full and not per-episode. The only DRM-free video TV media sources are usually non-legitimate (torrents etc.). Many shows/movies are also interestingly ripped from streaming sites first though. You can of course legally format shift your physical media for private use to non-DRMed files depending on your region.
ericmcer 7mo ago
Did you set up any alternatives? I have a todo to take a day and hook my external SSDs filled with movies/shows up to a plex server, then shutdown all my streaming services.
- dugidugout 7mo ago
  [Jellyfin](https://jellyfin.org/ https://jellyfin.org/) is a great alternative to Plex if you haven't taken a look!
LiquidSky 7mo ago
>Everyone adapted. I like the phrasing of this because it tells us nothing of whether your family liked the change (or felt better off with it) or not. You can adapt to a lot.

by shirro 7mo ago

Forgeties79 7mo ago

I canceled all of our subscriptions about two years ago and set up a Plex server. I don’t love the direction Plex is going in so I’m teeing up to flip to Jellyfin, but still, it has been so much better than dealing with all of these companies and nonsense. I feel like we can’t even call it “advertising“ anymore. It’s such a misnomer. It’s basically data fracking and psychological warfare to make us all into little addicts. This whole industry built around chasing “the attention economy” is a social blight.

Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
Jellyfin is nice but I could never understand how to setup when all I wanted was to watch videos from server for example. So I used copyparty[0] and used VLC and set a username and password. I recommend copyparty if you just want something quick and easy actually. Just try it out on cheap VPS and just run it and forget it. https://github.com/9001/copyparty https://github.com/9001/copyparty
- Forgeties79 7mo ago
  The big thing is being able to stream outside of my home network. Running stuff locally is easy enough with basically any system luckily
  - Imustaskforhelp 7mo ago
    Yes but you can actually have Copyparty run as a server similar to Jellyfin and have the same thing too? Am I missing something that I am not looking at? But won't jellyfin have the same issue, I think that plex has servers that you can connect from outside but the GP wanted to move to jellyfin and I was talking about that. And, you can even have plex like thing by just having Cloudflare Tunnels/Tailscale + Copyparty too.
- RiverCrochet 7mo ago
  Jellyfin isn't a simple viewer over a filesystem, you have to make a library and give it folders to ingest. It enforces an artist-album-track structure of media, so if you don't like that structure you'll be fighting Jellyfin more than using it.
cityzen 7mo ago
I had a lot of issues with plex on Apple TV and switched to Infuse. I haven’t tried jellyfin but figured I would mention it.
- Forgeties79 7mo ago
  Huh that’s surprising. So fer Plex has run on everything I’ve ever encountered
dpoloncsak 7mo ago
Similar boat...I'd also like to swap off Plex but a few of my less techie friends use it and I'm worried about the compatibility/ease of setup of Jellyfin on their devices. Thought about running both in parallel but that seems like a waste. Think I just need a migration day eventually
- Forgeties79 7mo ago
  Yeah nothing is as turnkey as plex, hard to give that up if you’re running a little streaming service for friends and family haha
- bombcar 7mo ago
  Jellyfin has been fine "around the house" but I don't know about remote access as I've not needed it. Jellyfin + Infuse + AppleTV is basically bulletproof; however Swiftfin as a client has been working fine.
- devilbunny 7mo ago
  I've never run Plex, or Jellyfin for that matter. There's a video share on my NAS. I point Infuse on Apple TV 4K's at it. It works, and cleanly. Downsides: you have to pay for Infuse Pro to play some formats and deal with some audio codecs. It's IIRC $17 for a year, though, so pretty reasonable for continued development. Your non-technical friends and family can't do the initial setup themselves (it's shared over Tailscale, they can all use the same limited account on your plan), but anyone I'm going to let do this can ship me their Apple TV 4K and let me set it up for them.
  - darkhorse222 7mo ago
    It's just weird that it's this complicated. We should get a static IP from our DNS. We should use standard open source streaming conversion mechanisms. It should go over basic video codecs. Lately I've been working towards just using a webserver to host video files. Sure, it's not adaptive, but for goodness sakes it's simple.
    - 7mo ago

juleiie 7mo ago

I don’t live in US or five eyes so I pirate all the stuff basically Scot free. I understand that it’s not so easy for Americans whose internet activity is constantly scrutinized. I’ve had the privilege of choosing exactly who and what I pay. I usually don’t subscribe to any streaming service, but when I do choose to pay for something, my money goes to smaller entities that I don’t actively want to see fail. In my book, none of the Hollywood deserves a single cent. It’s an amazing feeling to be in the power to dictate this.

05 7mo ago
Surely even the poorest of Americans can pay a couple bux a month for a seedbox?
- juleiie 7mo ago
  This is a good question. If it is so cheap and easy then why not? I think it is a matter of american government and corporate terror tactic. They make these few rare cases when they catch somebody so loud and showy that the rest of the flock prefers to sign all the TOS and don’t have this additional worry. It is a success story of manipulative scare techniques that copyright corpos mastered. Most people prefer to be civilians than to be anti corporate combatants, even if it is perfectly safe in practice. This is normal.
- arvid-lind 7mo ago
  The way I see it, you can get a top tier VPN (mullvad) and a seedbox for the cost of one streaming service per month.
- dfedbeef 7mo ago
  Surely these tent dwellers have a few dollars a month for streaming content
dfc 7mo ago
If you think Hollywood content is worthless why bother pirating it at all? It seems like you would just not consume it.

everdrive 7mo ago

Every single ToS is written to benefit the company, and when necessary, harm the consumer. The answer is to enter into as few service contracts as possible. Use open source software. Control when your software updates. Really, never use the cloud version of anything whatsoever except where unavoidable. (eg: email and such) They feel like the legal equivalent of Calvin Ball. So long as you just stash it in a ToS, you can apply any stupid rule your lawyers can imagine.

NoMoreNicksLeft 7mo ago
>The answer is to enter into as few service contracts as possible. Any contract where the other party performs so little seeking of my agreement (none at all really) that no representative talks to me in person or even electronically in an individual capacity, where no one witnesses me put my mark on the paper or hears by verbal assent, is in fact no contract at all. Despite what the courts may say. Should they say otherwise, they're wholly illegitimate. That any of you have let something else stand as the norm is bizarre and alarming. Contracts require explicit, sought agreement, by their very definition. Nothing can be implied. If their business model relies on implicit agreement because anything else would be too difficult, then they simply shouldn't be allowed to remain in business.
- seabass-labrax 7mo ago
  Isn't that a bit extreme? As a counterpoint, I find it useful to be able to pay for a train journey by tapping my card on an electronic reader - no representative of the company is there or otherwise witnesses me doing so - but I have entered into a contract whereby I am entitled to travel to a distant location. And I do want it to be a contract, because the transport company agrees to get me to my destination somehow even if the trains are cancelled. Perhaps the conditions of carriage may be somehow unsatisfactory to me, but the way in which I enter into the contract is almost entirely unrelated.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 7mo ago
    >but I have entered into a contract whereby I am entitled to travel to a distant location. I'm not sure why you drape this in the clothing of "legal contract". If the train fails to take you to your destination, they certainly aren't in breach. It seems really one-sided. Why do they need it to be a contract? Will you come and claw back the fare from them with them having no legal recourse?

datsci_est_2015 7mo ago

This ruling taken in conjunction with “in the future you will own nothing, and you will be happy” paints quite the dystopian picture where not even “turning off and disconnecting” will save you.

mghackerlady 7mo ago
the way we're headed (and largely already are) "turning off and disconnecting" will be a privilege of the rich and dream of the stubborn
- datsci_est_2015 7mo ago
  Indeed. “Privilege of the rich” could be the subtitle for the biography of America. Perhaps founded on the basis of rights for all men, but always denying or chipping away at those rights for the classes of labor. I’m always cheering for the farmers who are taking on John Deere for the right to repair.

blharr 7mo ago

Sure, but even the specific case isn't about TOS within the limits of screen time or online browsing. It's about tracking your physical location via Tile trackers. Sure, you can get off streaming services, but you're still signing a TOS or waiver by using any service. Meta/Google/etc has a profile on you even if you've never logged in based on others sharing their contacts and pictures that may include you.

gruez 7mo ago
>It's about tracking your physical location via Tile trackers. 1. If the complaint is about non-consensual tracking, using a gadget that's specifically designed and advertised for tracking, and that you have to specifically go out and buy and put on your body is a terrible example. 2. Tile trackers have more or less been replaced with airtags and whatever google's equivalent is, which is designed in such a way that prevents companies from knowing its actual location.
- blharr 7mo ago
  It's a completely grotesque point you've got. Tiles are advertised as used for personally tracking your devices. To the average person its the same technology as a Bluetooth earbud. Not a device for tracking at a central whatever 100 companies want that data. And for 2... thats completely irrelevant. "More or less"? So... a hundred of millions of tiles still out there is "more or less"?

dfxm12 7mo ago

Counterpoint: fighting for consumer protections is a fight worth not avoiding. Interacting with some of these systems is simply unavoidable (think payment systems, health care portals, email, etc.) & larger corporations already enjoy a huge power imbalance in this relationship. We will just get run over further if we hide from it.

KellyCriterion 7mo ago

The only reason why I bought a smartphone (first time!) in 2013 was because everyone aronud me had one and they were asking for WhatsApp - util then I was fine with my 4-color-crap phone :-D (and I didnt even know what WhatsApp was)

testing22321 7mo ago
I don’t have one. Sure it’s inconvenient from time to time, but the positives far outweigh the negatives.

larodi 7mo ago

This news came as I was clicking unsubscribe to all the weird mails that somehow keep piling up in my inbox, with LinkedIN being the leader, and then some by bandcamp. More than ever I enjoy turning off the mobile data while on the go. Very soon I'll do another round terminating most subscriptions, as Goog showed me what happens otherwise - it still owes me these 500$ that somehow miraculously flew out of my ads account when a campaign decided to suddenly come to live and start converting into obsolete project like 2 months after its designated final date. Nobody ever came back to my complaints.

tedggh 7mo ago

As an avid reader and outdoors enthusiast, I feel there’s a lot of value on “wasting” time with a movie or limited series. Absolutely, there are so many better things to do and experience than watching TV, but no one should be stressing out about maximizing their time doing them. In fact, going against that mindset once in a while, and allowing yourself to not do the thing you think you should be doing, is an experience by itself. Also, it doesn’t need to be a complete waste of time. If you like history or art, there’s a lot of content both as fiction and non fiction that you would find intellectually stimulating (I highly recommend Criterion for this) One cold November night my wife picked a movie called Babette's Feast. I absolutely loved the photography. I did some research and found it was inspired by Danish painter Hammershoi, which I never heard of. For Christmas, my wife gave me a beautifully printed, limited edition of his work by the Jacquemart museum in Paris. Later this year we plan to make a stop in Copenhagen on our way to Sweden to visit friends, so we can see Hammershoi work at the museums.

hirvi74 7mo ago
> allowing yourself to not do the thing you think you should be doing, is an experience by itself. In my life, I have a term for that. It's called everyday.
darkhorse222 7mo ago
Wasted time should not be defined as unproductive time, it should be time you did not experience, time you were completely clocked out, not even enjoyed, not relaxed or relished. Wasted. It is a subtle difference but critical to remember if you want to reclaim your time rather than claiming it for capitalism.
ericmcer 7mo ago
Seriously you can have a very pure experience interacting with media. I did a mushroom trip ~5 years ago and was having a not great time walking around outside. Cars, other people, sun, bugs etc. were all not sitting right. I went home and watched "Life in Colour", an Attenborough documentary about amazing uses of color in animals. It was a top experience and I still remember scenes from it years later. Anyway don't throw the baby out with the bathwater and all that, there is a reason we developed digital entertainment.

tzs 7mo ago

> It turns out a lot of things we are told we need, we really don't. People lived without them as recently as a few years ago. It also often turns out that when some new way comes along to do something that people like to do, the ways they used to do those things go away. If you don't like the new way you can't go back to how it used to be done. The last physical media video rental store within a reasonable drive of me closed around 8 years ago. Redbox went away in 2024. There is still rental by mail, but that is slow. Those who liked being able to be able to rent a movie without planning days ahead are stuck with streaming now. Another example is cell phones. It used to be that there were pay phones all over the place. Nearly every public place had a payphone nearby. In most cities there was a good chance there was a street payphone on every block, and nearly every restaurant and gas station had one. On freeways there were call boxes to summon help. Pay phones peaked in the US in 1995. When cell phones went mainstream in the early to mid 2000s, pay phones rapidly went away, and in about 10 years were almost all gone. Around 90% of freeway call boxes also disappeared. They now are mostly only in areas with poor cellular coverage. If you want to be able to make calls while out and about now doing it the way it was done before cell phones quite likely is not feasible.

pests 7mo ago
While not exactly the same as freeway call boxes... pretty much every state requires any business that are listed on the food/gas/hotel/recreation signs for off ramps to have a free phone for public use.
darkhorse222 7mo ago
Perhaps this makes a very big difference to you, but I often have to remind myself that iTunes movie rentals are very much alive and function just as they do some ten years ago. No subscription required. Not physical, sure, but a normal rental experience. Though I do miss old Netflix. That was fun.
jgwil2 7mo ago
> Those who liked being able to be able to rent a movie without planning days ahead are stuck with streaming now. Just want to point out that public libraries often have great DVD collections (also music, games, and more) and are often underutilized. Definitely still a viable way to watch a movie for many folks.

javier2 7mo ago

Is there some place I can still buy TV shows or movies? Preferably DRM free

pocksuppet 7mo ago
Doubtful, but there are [redacted to comply with the rules]
- javier2 7mo ago
  the what?
c0balt 7mo ago
You can try to buy physical media. A surprising amount of shows and movies are still published as Blu-rays. The release there is usually a bit delayed to streaming releases though and will set you back more if you buy it new. The used market can be your friend here, especially for older media. IME local libraries might also have quite a good offering depending on their funding and priorities. The clear downside here is that you can't really follow along with others though (if that's your jam) as these releases are mostly in-full and not per-episode. The only DRM-free video TV media sources are usually non-legitimate (torrents etc.). Many shows/movies are also interestingly ripped from streaming sites first though. You can of course legally format shift your physical media for private use to non-DRMed files depending on your region.

ericmcer 7mo ago

Did you set up any alternatives? I have a todo to take a day and hook my external SSDs filled with movies/shows up to a plex server, then shutdown all my streaming services.

dugidugout 7mo ago
[Jellyfin](https://jellyfin.org/ https://jellyfin.org/) is a great alternative to Plex if you haven't taken a look!

LiquidSky 7mo ago

>Everyone adapted. I like the phrasing of this because it tells us nothing of whether your family liked the change (or felt better off with it) or not. You can adapt to a lot.