Continue to not use Facebook/Instagram.

I switched to Lemmy when Reddit came out in support of people who abuse children. I don’t even mean Trump, I just mean in general. I suggested abusers in general should face harsher penalties. They banned me for it. I said “holy shit you just did me a huge favor, apparently I was on the wrong site because our values are 100% incompatible.”

I mean, there isn’t even a debate. I’m not talking about people who find themselves attracted to kids. I’m talking about people who actually went out and hurt a real child facing longer, more meaningful sentences and they said nah, those people are people and need to be protected.

I’ve moved social networks on account of incompatible values and I think others will, too. Maybe not the majority but I think some others will. Especially as things get worse. There are networks for people who hate (like Truth Social), and networks for people who don’t care (like Facebook/Insta/Whatsapp), but I think as things change, more people will care and will look elsewhere. Not everyone but some people.

Here’s what’s wild though. At first with music streaming it was largely just American, Western, popular music. I left Spotify for Apple Music because the latter had Japanese music and I was tired of sideloading it into Spotify. Now Spotify has Japanese music too.

The Japanese music market is super weird. Anime is to Japanese music in the 2010s and 2020s what MTV was to western music in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It’s the international hit maker. So anime is bringing western eyes to all this music, not you go in YouTube and a lot of them have “YouTube edition” videos that are like half the video. Because they don’t fully trust us I guess? Sometimes the video is on Apple Music though.

I know Japanese music is more expensive than ours. I mean like the cost of a CD. So when bands would release a Japanese album, they’d add bonus tracks to help increase the value. Western bands do it too. Look up an album you know on Wikipedia and see if there’s a Japanese version with some bonus tracks.

I’m wondering how Apple Music and later Spotify more or less tamed the Japanese music market but TV and movies are so much harder.

Thanks I guess? Surely Mac and Linux users can be friends or at least allies against Windows. Linux comes from UNIX which macOS is based on so they’re very similar, only one is FOSS — which I suppose is the point — and the other is not. But another commonality — Macs and PCs can both run Linux.

Absolutely. But to clarify, Apple Music pays more per stream than Spotify and others. Spotify trends to cut bigger checks to popular musicians because they have more subscribers.

Also — someone feel free to fact check this — I’ve heard that if, say, you put an album out on BandCamp but not streaming, and I buy it and sideload it into both services, and you later add it to both services, Spotify won’t pay you for my streams because I’m streaming the sideloaded copy whereas Apple will match it. I keep the metadata if it’s different but you’d get paid for the streams because it matches it.

I switched to Mac after my old Asus laptop went out. I figure why bother with a PC laptop, it’s not gonna game and let’s see what the fuss is about. Love my MacBook Air. So then our desktop dies and I give my wife 3 options. A Mac, a cheaper PC, and a more expensive PC. She’s Android, figured she’d want to stick with Windows, but she picked the Mac! So happy. I mostly game on Switch and Xbox these days so that’s fine.

I keep feeling like I left Windows at the right time.

There’s an easy solution to this. I pay for Apple Music because I get access to pretty much all the music I want. I can sideload what they don’t have, which isn’t much. They have better audio quality, and aren’t stiffing artists to pay some right wing nutjob science denier like the other streaming platform of note. I pay because I love music and want to support what I love. Why isn’t there a similar service for TV and movies? That’s the solution. Let us pay for what we love and make it easy. Apple figured it out with music. Valve figured it out with games.

I think they don’t want to solve the problem. I think they want to solve a different problem. I think they’re making this a problem so they can push legislation to protect their profits.

Facts

I just replaced my dying Windows machines (a laptop and later, a desktop) with Macs. Still closed source, but they’re UNIX certified. I know FOSS folks love to hate on macOS, but even being smart enough to use Linux, and having used it off and on for 20-25 years, I just didn’t want to. I did get away from Microsoft stuff, at least at home, except for Xbox. That was my wife’s choice and we have a bunch of games for it. I’m more of a PlayStation guy, but I kinda got outvoted on that one. These days I mostly just game on the Switch anyway. And the cool thing about new Macs? They can basically run Switch games, with a bit of help (but same-ish architecture). And a lot of games going to Switch(/2) can also go to Mac (e.g. Cyberpunk).

It’s a great time to get away from Microsoft. Their browser hasn’t been good enough in decades. Their office suite is probably their biggest strength, followed by Xbox. Their cloud would be third, I’d say — OneDrive is underrated. I use iWork on my Macs and it’s fine. And it can read/write the docx formats. For cloud I guess iCloud is fine on the Mac side, I just wish the pricing were more competitive. Don’t really have a good answer for cloud. And for gaming… if you were starting from zero, I’d say look at the Steam Deck, Steam sales are unbeatable, the thing runs Linux, it emulates PC games pretty well (there’s a whole certification thing), and you can do GeForce Now as well if you’re near their CDN. Microsoft is arguably the easiest of the big three (vs Apple and Google) to drop.

I don’t even need to know why people are going against Microsoft all of a sudden. I have my reasons. I don’t hate them, and I would have stuck with Office + OneDrive (MS 365) if they didn’t double the price to add AI to Office with no way to stick with the old product. They were getting $60 a year from me, now they’re not getting anything.

Here’s why it’s okay to block ads in pretty simple terms:

Ads can contain ransomware; that is to say, a seemingly innocent ad can deliver a payload which will run on your computer, lock your files, and demand you pay hundreds or even thousands of dollars anonymously.

Now if you go to the website that served the ad and tell them, “I allowed ads on your site because I support your right to monetise your content, and now I have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars, will you help me pay that” or “will you pay that for me since your site served the ransomware,” you know what they will tell you, every single time, without fail? Whether they actually answer you, or more likely, just delete your email. They’re telling you that it’s your problem. That you should have secured your computer better.

So secure your computer better now. Block all the ads.

Getting a little more technical, use Firefox or a fork of it. Use Linux if you can. Use a Mac if you can’t. If you really must use Windows, know how to secure it. I use Windows 11 at work, I’d never use it at home, but I had a talk with the IT guy, and he let me do a few things to it. I know more than he does, but he’s the one with the job, so I told him what I’d do before I did it, I did exactly what I said I was going to do, nothing more nothing less, and I still think my home computer is more secure, but I’m a lot less worried about using the work machine. I think it’s wild that so many companies just use Windows. I’m not trying to hate on Windows. It’s good for gaming and it’s accessible. I’d love to see more companies roll their own *nix or just use Macs (which run macOS which is UNIX certified).

I feel like more people should know what’s going on. Facebook has done some scummy stuff in the past. Now Zuck is openly defending his AI grooming children. In and of itself it doesn’t make a lot of sense — what’s the upshot for Meta here? But outside the bubble of logic, it sets kids up to be groomed by real predators. It’s unacceptable.

People say the problem is that all the people they know are on Facebook. Two issues: most of those people would forget you exist if you leave Facebook. Also, you’re the reason they’re there. The second reason is that you are literally the product. You being on Facebook is part of the reason those people are, too, so be the change you want to see in the world.