Idk, I don’t agree. I think in many ways actually online is a lot less brainrot.

Online I can block ads. IRL I cannot.

Online I can block morons. IRL I cannot.

Online I can choose pretty freely what to do and when and with whom and why.

IRL depends a lot more on what’s available locally and transport options.

Online I can connect with people across the globe, massively increasing the likelihood of finding friends due to higher overall population meaning more people who are into the same stuff I am.

IRL I’m limited to the smallest fraction of a fraction of people who are coincidentally local and also happen to have things I have in common with, and id also need to meet them somehow, which is about negligible odds.

Online my options for research are practically unlimited, I can see and evaluate multiple perspectives and check the sources easily.

IRL not so, and for news I’m largely limited to propaganda from MSM billionaire outlets.

Online I am safe from physical violence and threats, I’m free to speak my mind and voice my beliefs, IRL - not so much.

I think the internet is good, actually, and if it hasn’t had a good impact on you, I’m sorry, but that’s a skill issue.

It’s funny that people claim ownership of companies by individuals (capitalism) is so efficient when there are extreme and obvious problems when the distant private equity board needs an entire department to tell them what the company does and how well every few months, compared to y’know, ownership by people who work there and would know how well the company (and their part of it) is doing just by actually being remotely involved.

The tool that doesn’t exist anywhere else is so true. I had a boss that insinuated I was inexperienced because I didn’t know his specific internal process (which was complete nonsense because he is literally illiterate and cannot read or write).

When I politely corrected him that this was my second job in this specific industry he paused before continuing to ramble as if I’m some intern when I was with the company for 3 years in a midlevel role.

Same guy who once gave me a 30 mins lecture about how much he wants women like me and his daughter to succeed and “have a voice”, literally without letting me insert more than 1 word the entire time.

Stop using anything with algorithmic feeds for a start. So no Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, TikTok, etc etc.

For YouTube - turn off watch history in your account settings. It turns off the home page. Bookmark the subscriptions page and use that and only that so you’re only watching channels you’re subscribed to. I also use ublock to turn off the comments and the suggested bar on the side. I’ve never used the app and I don’t watch videos on my phone.

You can also set an app timer for your Lemmy client, I’ve done it for Jerboa in the past and while it didn’t really work for me, it’s something that may work for you.

With local media that’s a really good idea you got going.

You do need to replace the stuff rather than leave a vacuum, so this would be a good time to pick up a new hobby or get back to an old one, something nice, chill and fairly passive so you don’t feel you’re too exhausted to do it after work, in the same way you’d scroll sm passively.

I may not agree on the whole divorcing from screens thing as IRL really is just a different type of brainrot IMO and an even more biased self selecting echochamber, but I do think divorcing from big tech is a good thing because fuck corpos and regardless I wish you luck!

Not everyone has a car y’know. Actually I don’t even know anyone who does.

As long as he isn’t also sporting the Death in June merch

Thank you so much! This valuable info needs to be signal boosted for sure

The world is just an unwelcoming place right now, perhaps always has been. Worst comes to worst maybe we can hack it somewhere remote heh

Millions are dying now due to the dudes in power now. Billions more are suffering. Once the palantir sell-offs are complete in the west and the democracies of Europe are left with no assets and not what few they have now after decades of trickle down, there will really be no turning back from the cyberpunk dystopia, and then many more will perish.

I think a better world is worth fighting for.

Yes PRC bad. USSR bad.

Buuut, the USSR did have free housing, free healthcare, free bills, free and quality higher ed, plenty jobs in STEM, while yes, also having horrific repressions inside and imperialist ambition outside too.

The successor state of the Soviet Union is as much a product of soviet corruption as it is a product of IMF’s “shock therapy” that forced rapid privatization in the name of capitalism and cuts to public services in a country that was basically near 100% public services, which led to widespread poverty and the well-connected cashing in their political capital for all the country’s resources, industry and infrastructure, creating the oligarch class and setting up an electorate primed for brainwashing with populist strongman rhetoric and a government ready to be inevitably influenced by the oligarchs, and when capitalists control the government the only result is fascism.

Lol I see. Don’t right-wing propaganda shills these days have access to DeepL or something? Your grammar is fucking awful.

Just for the record for lurkers ITT: I am an immigrant and I came to ze west originally on a student visa, no one “imported” me, finding a job was nigh impossible because no we don’t work illegally because the risk of losing a visa is very high and there are strict limits on jobs you can do, when and how long, including both by profession and by income level, often far above median and only if the corpo has the license and paperwork which all cost fuckloads for them, and finding a job out of that limited pool as a fresh grad was hell on earth.

The only reason I could even get to that stage was because my parents were fairly well off and across the 7 or so years before I became independent the costs of immigrating were in the hundreds of thousands on them. I had to leave the nest at 13.

When I started working I had to pay double tax for healthcare through visa fees first, then off my income tax as normal, and it took 13 years to get a permanent residence permit on the “10-year route” due to other hidden requirements during which I lived in permanent fear of deportation, the only reason I did it was genuine fear of persecution in my country of origin for being LGBT due to the fascist government there.

I’m sharing this here because the general public’s idea of immigration is often well - nuts, and completely out of touch with reality of immigrants, so hopefully now if you didn’t know, you know better.

No? I wasn’t responding to you lol wtf, re-read the thread, I’m responding to the same guy you responded to, who said:

"The difference between Nazis and communists is that one of them lost a world war. You should not give them the time of day. "

Yeah chief I don’t agree with your witticism here.

Call me crazy, but I think people who want to improve the world somewhat based on an economic and sociopolitical analysis of a pretty smart dude who’s work still shapes our economic understanding even in the most pro-capitalist reaganist fringes today do in fact have a few more differences with people who built an ideology based on using a merged government-corporate state apparatus to exterminate jews, queers, slavs etc. to create more living space for their specific ethnicity.

I also think you don’t actually have to pretend like Nazis and communists are equal or even close just to be able to criticize the imperialism and many mistakes and general dysfunction of the USSR, tankies and general bad faith argumentation like in OP probably done by a random putlerist fascist russian shill/bot or like a 14 year old who skimmed a wikipedia info box on dialectics once.

Communists are why we have unions, minimum wage, universal healthcare, welfare, safety nets, 5-day work week etc. Fascists are why we have the Holocaust, and I guess now also no jimmy Kimmel.

I knew about him vaguely just from staying in the loop with politics casually since 2016 or so. But I haven’t heard of him in a long time.

In the west - yeah? Obviously third worlders also believe in various miracle healers and televangelist preachers and such, but those countries too have scientific minds and communities and bodies that practice evidence-based, aka “western” modern medicine.

Ikr I’m also suffering from this rn, but in my case throw on chills until I pop paracetamol and then I’m on a grill, bone aches like I got Raynaud’s in my legs… Yup it’s flu time!

That’s not really even close to what I asked.

Just gonna repost my comment from the thread on the Technology community yesterday for suggestions and discussion: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/21273053

I used Navidrome and Symfonium with Picard for metadata and relied on a combination of Bandcamp, Rutracker and yt-dlp with a YTM free trial, along with the Spotify data export and manual python scripting elbow grease to fetch, tag all the music from my Spotify and recreate every playlist as m3u8 to be imported inside the Docker, then more elbow grease to actually make the playlist semi-accurate.

Despite Symfonium constantly losing its silly always online DRM license check and locking me out of both my cached and remote (via PiVPN to Nginx on home server to Navidrome) songs due to me having multiple Google accounts on my phone and the app freaking out because it would check the wrong account, forcing me to log out of all accounts and reset the app - losing all my customization and my credit card access for payments until I signed into the right Google account again, I had a fairly functional setup, even with playlist cover art and everything on Symfonium (despite it not being a feature in Navidrome itself).

My playlists were just as they were on Spotify down to each specific song title, album cover and most importantly of course metadata correctness and song order (I have never used shuffle in my life).

Unfortunately I went back to Spotify in the end because most music i listen to is niche and fairly Indie and thus either a pain in the ass to pirate or simply outright unavailable externally anywhere, and to maintain consistent proper metadata for what is there was like a full-time job even with some automation through Picard. I still did this for half a year. Mostly because I just did it while WFH.

I eventually simply gave up downloading more music and listened to the same few thousand songs in my transferred playlists on repeat which for me led to a feeling of stagnancy and eventually depression in life, after I begrudgingly came back to Spotify I immediately discovered several hundred new songs and created multiple new playlists just during my walks to and from the grocery store alone.

My ultimate problem is that on Spotify if I look something up I can just listen to it right away and immediately add it to my library or to a playlist of my choosing.

In contrast, when self-hosting I would have to first look up the music on Google, go to YouTube to listen to it in dogshit quality, look up album/artist on Rutracker, pray that it’s there when a lot of the time it is not, filter out albums/songs I don’t want from the discography torrent and add it to my qbittorrent-nox on server, mount the NFS share on my main windows PC with my music staging folder, add metadata with musicbrainz Picard and have it move to the finalized folder, then rescan on Navidrome webui, rescan on Symfonium local cache, then add to a playlist, then listen.

This is like, 2-3 hours of conscious effort just for me to skip to the middle of the song, listen for 30 seconds, decide I don’t like the song and delete it from the playlist, never to be heard again.

It’s way too much.

The unfortunate truth is that despite feeling good about whatever miniscule amount of effect I might have on stopping this wealth transfer from artists and listeners to Spotify and our corporate overlords while those same overlords win elections and take away my human rights while I can’t even easily get a fitting new song in decent quality to listen to when attempting to find some peace in that mess, the alternatives just aren’t worth it for me.

Yes I could just accept to have less, to just make do with the music I have, but that requires motivation that’s frankly hard to maintain if you look around and see how the rest of society behaves, eagerly falling for whatever corposlop becomes available.

Felt like I’m cutting off my nose to spite my face tbqh.

I would love for it to work as it does with Jellyfin and Immich, I have replaced GDrive, Netflix, Google Photos and damn near everything, Spotify is my only subscription left, but it just hasn’t worked for me to move off of it long-term. I’d love suggestions on how this problem can be fixed though.

Some ideas of mine:

1. Musicbrainz metadata is awful. Half the time the cover art is someone’s photo of some shitty Japanese vinyl with stickers. Pull covers off YT or Spotify. In fact - pull all metadata off Spotify via scraping, with Musicbrainz volunteer metadata serving only as intermediary to connect the audio to the musicbrainz id which should connect to a Spotify option and potentially a fallback option if somehow the music isn’t on Spotify.

2. There should be an intelligent playlist creator of some sort where I can give it my Spotify account export data and it can go off song titles and albums in the playlists within to create playlists in navidrome by finding matches in my library and automatically downloading missing ones and it should be at least 99% accurate (most “Spotify playlist downloader” type websites are 99% inaccurate for instance).

3. Navidrome or one of it’s clients should have a plugin to get suggestions at the bottom of playlists like Spotify via last.fm and play music instantly directly from Spotify/YTM, with a button to add a song to your playlist, when you do so, it automatically downloads it, copies metadata off Spotify, and adds it to whatever playlist you added it to.

All that should hopefully ease the pain and make it so you can discover, listen and add to your library without so many barriers.

Yeah I remember being out with work colleagues IRL at a pub and there was some friends or a company, it was absolutely rammed as well, some guy kept talking to me because I think he was a friend of a colleague, and he kept buying me drinks, but I straight up didn’t realize he was even talking to me most of the time because of how packed it was, and at work it was tradition for people to take turns to buy rounds for everyone so I thought I was getting drinks on someone from work 💀

If I even understood that this person was trying to probably approach, my reaction would’ve been “literally who” because I never even knew him before, but also, that’s true for 99% of men.

I feel like it’s clear from this seemingly widespread psychological tendency of distrusting strangers that if there’s a kernel of truth to the pseudoscience that is evolutionary psychology it’s that perhaps we as a species were meant to have a much smaller social circle where we’d know everyone intimately and pick a mate over the course of a long time knowing them or at least knowing about them in our little tribe, transitioning from friends to eventually dating etc. that way also if someone was abusive you’d know just because you’d probably know and possibly be even friends with all their exes, the unknown risk is just kinda not there.

Obviously in a global urban world with the sheer amount of people you’d be lucky to even see the same person more than once, all behavior is effectively inconsequential like in an open world video game because other people might as well despawn as soon as you turn the corner. Dating apps are kind of a market solution to this, but obviously corpos have totally misaligned incentives because men to them are the customer who they need to make pay, with promise of women being the product, and men need to be kept on the app as much as possible and thus single to make them the most money, so it’s just fucked.

Actual answer.