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The Fediverse and Content Creation: Monetization


I’ve been thinking a lot recently about PeerTube, Loops, Bandwagon, and other platforms in the Fediverse that are geared around artists. I might get flamed for this, and you’re welcome to disagree, but I think the network is in dire need of having support for commerce.

Not “Big Capitalism” commerce, but the ability for people to buy and sell things, support projects, and commission their favorite creators to keep making more stuff.


The Fediverse and Content Creation: Monetization


One thing that I've been thinking about for a while: the PeerTube platform is somewhat limited in providing tools for video-makers to receive financial support. At best, PeerTube offers a "Support" button on videos, but all this really does is provide a lightbox with links to various donation pages.
A PeerTube video with the "Support" button clicked and the lightbox expanded. There are tons of links and bullet points and stuff that requires the viewer to basically navigate somewhere else to support their favorite creators.It's better than nothing, but not by much.
I actually think this is a bit of a problem when it comes to getting creators to use platforms such as PeerTube or Loops. A lot of people don't really see a point in joining a whole new ecosystem when they're well-established on YouTube or Tiktok to begin with, and a lack of financial incentives might make this seem like an exercise in futility.

The majority of this post is going to be focusing on financial support mechanisms specifically, but I want to be clear that this alone is not a silver bullet solution. It's just something that I think requires a lot of attention first. I'm going to talk about a few things the Fediverse ecosystem offers to mitigate this problem, with some thoughts on how we can better support video makers on federated platforms.

Payments, Access, and Friction


There are a few sticking points here that are worth thinking about. First and foremost is that, historically speaking, most Fediverse platforms don't offer good mechanisms for providing access to special paid content. From my limited understanding, there are two parts to think about:

  • Payment Systems - payments in the Fediverse is still kind of a nascent, fledgling thing. A few systems offer the capability of buying or selling things through one or two major payment processing systems, and it's usually Stripe or PayPal. Part of the headache here is that this situation inherently props up a few monopolistic platforms, rather than allowing people to use whatever payment system is available in their own countries. Some of this can be worked around using cryptocurrencies – famously, the Mitra project leverages Monero for this very purpose, although I'm told it now can accept other forms of payment as well.
  • Account Access - Historically speaking, the lion's share of Fediverse platforms lack a granular system for granting permissions to remote accounts. Most platforms in the Fediverse emulate Mastodon's privacy scopes, which don't do the best job of delegating which groups of people can see or interact with something. Either everybody can see a post, or just your mutuals can. Complicating things even further, there's not a great way to set something visible to a specific someone and let them know about it, unless you're specifically sending them a Private Message directly.


What's Available Today


There are a few cutting-edge attempts to solve this problem, and I think they might offer different pieces of the puzzle.

Premium Users


One PeerTube plugin I have a lot of admiration for is simply called Premium Users, and it does exactly what you'd expect. PeerTube channels that have this integration set up offer a special paid subscription button on their pages, and it does two things:

  1. It takes a Stripe transaction to process payments.
  2. It takes note of which Fediverse accounts made this transaction, and adds them to a special group that can see videos intended specifically for them.

On paper, this is great! We at least have a proof-of-concept to say that hey, this thing is in fact doable. Unfortunately, there are a few shortcomings:

  • Limited Utility — people can only get this special access by clicking the button on PeerTube. If they tried to pay you out of band, through something like Patreon or Kofi, there isn't a way to easily set up their Fediverse account as Premium Subscribers. The payment system has no concept of what their Fediverse identity is, and the manual way for adding people is kind of messy and confusing.
  • Rigid Scope — the plugin basically has to get set up by an admin, and use their Stripe account. Users then upgrade their own PeerTube accounts to add payment, and they get upgraded to a special user type. Anyone with that user type can see "Premium" videos from anybody on the instance, and the money only goes to the instance admin. This is less than ideal.
  • Vendor Limitations — it only works with Stripe at the moment, which is not necessarily what other people are using to make simple donations. Trying to account for multiple vendors might be challenging, as it means that such an integration has to abstract away the specific vendors in another layer. This is not impossible, but can be somewhat cumbersome if you're trying to just offer a simple plugin that's easy to set up.

Unfortunately, this is kind of a deal-breaker if you wanted to create something similar to YouTube's "Channel Membership" feature for the Fediverse. It's less Patreon-like, and more like a way to see all the exclusive paywalled media in one place.

At the very least, we have a proof-of-concept on how to at least broker access to special content on PeerTube using payments. It's not perfect, but maybe it could be a foundation to build on?

Granular Permissions / Circles


Some of the most impressive development on this front comes from the Bonfire project, because their system actually lets people put their contacts into special collections.


Circles, which are Bonfire's concept for addressable groups, and Boundaries, which are the permission sets that can be assigned to them.

While it can be a little bit tedious to set up manually, the main thing to understand is that this works really, really well. You can have as many collections as you'd like, they can all have special rules applied to them, and you can decide which collections can see which things you post.
This can easily get super, super comprehensive. The UX definitely still needs some love to make it easier to manage.
From a technical perspective, I see Bonfire as a shining example for what all Fediverse platforms should follow: we need to think about access, permissions, and addressing for posts, all at the same time. You can create special custom presets today, and scope it to a specific group of people.

While I think the UX behind this is still complicated, I think the concept is solid, and a simplified version could be a very powerful way to create special scopes of friends or followers.

Paid Circles


The Emissary project has been thinking long and hard about this problem by offering Circles, which are the very user collections we've been talking about up to this point. For their Bandwagon application, the lead dev has been thinking a lot about music sales, as well as different ways to support artists. As a result, the UX is very much simplified, and more user-friendly.


Examples of how different Circles can be set up as support tiers for artists.

Bandwagon does something neat by allowing musicians to turn membership of a specific Circle into a paid subscription. This allows artists to create special private things.posts, share events for secret shows, and even offer special tracks and albums to the people supporting them.
spectra.video/videos/embed/eod…
The lead dev, Ben Pate, has gone on the record in stating a desire to support many different payment providers in order to avoid monopolization of just one or two big vendors. He gave a really good presentation about the subject back in August for FediCon 2025, and it's worth watching.

CrowdBucks


CrowdBucks is still a relative newcomer to the space, and offers a few novel approaches that are worth thinking about. It's open source, and you can host it yourself, and the project acts as a wrapper around payment integrations to provide payment status, as well as subscriber information. That includes Fediverse handles!


A demo of a CrowdBucks fundraising page.

What really sets CrowdBucks apart is this: you don't actually create an account, in the traditional sense. Instead, you log in with your existing Fediverse identity, which then allows you to financially support whoever you want, while also allowing you to do fundraising for yourself.

One other benefit I see to having services like CrowdBucks is the benefit of decoupling payment infrastructure away from Fediverse instances. Rather than trying to get a bunch of different platforms and instances to try to juggle Stripe and PayPal API keys for admins and users, it would probably be way easier to just handle the actual payment action on a separate layer outside of the social platforms themselves. Instead of every creator trying to sign into a bunch of different services, they could just authenticate against their CrowdBucks payment server instead.

Honorable Mention: Mitra


Although the project isn't as well-known as some of the other efforts on here, it's important to acknowledge Mitra and what it has pioneered. In a nutshell, this is a simple, stylish Fediverse platform that has paid subscription capabilities built in.


Subscribing to an account results in a dialogue to determine how much you're supporting a creator per month.

In a lot of ways, Mitra predates almost all of the other attempts to incorporate payments into the Fediverse. The lead dev behind it, Silverpill, is very active in the Fediverse Enhancement Proposals community, which aims to help extend ActivityPub capabilities in a somewhat standardized, grassroots way.
Posting to just your Paid Subscribers works out of the box!
Mitra has experienced some friction in being adopted by the wider Fediverse due to an ideological divide: historically, the platform has only supported Monero for payment, and the wider Fediverse itself doesn't generally hold a positive view on cryptocurrencies to begin with. A recent release no longer strictly requires Monero, but some glue code would still need to be written to support payment processors.

Putting It All Together


So, we have all of these different pieces. Can we use them together to accomplish what we want?

Let's say that we use CrowdBucks as the middleware that wraps around potentially many different payment solutions. It offers an API, can capture information about who is paying you for something, and can potentially even denote what thing they're paying for specifically. Great! Upon initial payment, a special follow request could get forwarded to the creator's account, which automatically gets approved upon proof of payment.

A plugin or integration could directly hook up to CrowdBucks, and then automatically put that paid subscriber into a dedicated Circle as a permission scope that can see stuff intended just for them. Additionally, this special follow request could also enable special notifications that tells the subscriber when new stuff is available to them.

A lapse in payment or cancellation could also be handled automatically through CrowdBucks, resulting in the Subscriber being automatically removed from the Circle after a set period of time.

Limitations


This concept is not without a few different headaches. Let's talk about them.

Currency Support


While a fair amount of payment processors are set up to handle international currency exchanges, the experience could be messier for platforms that aren't set up to handle it.

This is particularly glaring in situations where one person might want to pay with cryptocurrency, and the recipient doesn't actually accept that.

What might make sense is for CrowdBucks to allow people to plug in a multitude of different payment providers, defaulting to a "path of equilibrium" where the payee and recipient both go through whatever payment system they both have in common. The alternative is to basically establish some kind of escrow/transfer service for money in various forms, and that can get pretty complicated.

Fediverse Identity


Identity in the Fediverse is still somewhat flaky and non-standard. The secret sauce that CrowdBucks uses for Fediverse Login is really just a series of platform-specific integrations, such as "Sign in With Mastodon", "Sign in With Pixelfed", and "Sign in With PeerTube".
Good concept overall, but lack of a uniform solution is killing us. Source: GreatApe
This isn't a great experience for anyone that's not using those specific platforms. Theoretically, we should all be using the ActivityPub Client-To-Server API for platform-agnostic Identity Login, but the biggest players such as Mastodon have yet to really embrace C2S in any way, shape, or form.

If we could all rally around C2S for at least this singular use-case, we might be able to have a universal login system for the entire network.

Ecosystem Support


Finally, the biggest headache here is buy-in. It's very challenging to get a bunch of different groups of people to align to a common set of goals, implementations, and methodologies.

My thinking here is simple: if we can get some level of integration working for PeerTube, Pixelfed, Loops, and any other federated platform where such a thing might be handy, we might be able to make major strides in solving this problem.

I'm Still Optimistic


While I think we still have a long way to go before we get to a place where there's a clear-cut "standard experience" on how these things should happen, it's evident that there are a lot of pieces being developed that could be made to work together.

I hold the view that commerce, understood through the lens of "the marketplace or bazaar at the center of town", could be extremely beneficial for the Fediverse. If we are to build this thing, it's going to require a lot of careful consideration, with different builders comparing notes on how they're currently doing it.

Anyway, thanks for reading!


in reply to Sean Tilley

Where'd my other comment go? Editorial censorship takes this from "a really bad idea" to a super fucked up attempt at poisoning this beautiful place with the worship of wealth
in reply to Sean Tilley

There is nothing stopping anyone from running ads and making deals with creators.

There is nothing stopping creators and hosters from accepting payments via Monero.

Also, we should stop trying to figure out how to make other people money.



Email client that imports labels as tags instead of folders on Linux (and Android)


Problem Statement

I'm in the process of de-googling, and I'm about 60% there, but I still need gmail for the things that I cannot or have not yet migrated.

I've also recently experimented w/ the Thunderbird app for both Linux and Android, and it's okay. One thing that really irritates me is the fact that when I import my emails from gmail, all my labels are handled as folders in Thunderbird. This is an issue b/c I have rules to help organize incoming email by assigning one or more labels. I believe Thunderbird has the concept of tags, but by default Thunderbird routes gmail labels to folders instead of tags.

Question

Is there a mail client on Linux (and Android) that handles labels from gmail as tags instead of folders? Alternatively, is there a setting in Thunderbird that will use tags instead of labels that I'm just not aware of?

I've tried searching DDG, but came up with nothing useful beyond other posts on other social media websites asking similar questions.

Questa voce è stata modificata (1 settimana fa)
in reply to Ardens

Agreed, this is where I'm at as well.

What I've had in place for the last decade or more made sense to me once upon a time, but it's over engineered and of limited usefulness.

Despite the potential technical solutions offered in other comments, I've resolved to go through and clean up my email history, including deleting stuff I no longer need and reconfiguring how I assign labels to incoming messages in gmail in order to make sense to my current self and play nice with the folder system, which seems to be more industry standard anyway.

Questa voce è stata modificata (1 settimana fa)
in reply to curious_dolphin

I can only applaud it. And a nice cleanup once every decade feels good too. 😀


Filen free plan. Any good?


I was looking for a Google Drive alternative. Its mainly for storing small documents. 10GB is Filen's limit on their free plan. Its more than enough.

But I am concerned about their privacy. Have anyone used it? I am ready to pay for a really good service but if they are giving it for free than I why should I pay if they are private enough?

They also have paid ones but they are an overkill for me. I mainly use offline HDD backups. These are for some quick access files. I don't need an app or anything. Simple web login would be fine.

Questa voce è stata modificata (1 settimana fa)
in reply to tuskyo

I hear that TerraBox has 1TB accounts for free. /s


Pete Hegseth's use of Canadian character Franklin the turtle in post about boat strikes prompts anger, mockery


Franklin the turtle is a Canadian creation beloved by generations of children, so when U.S. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth turned him into a bazooka-wielding soldier in a social media post Sunday, many people were alarmed.

Hegseth's post featured a mock cover of a Franklin children's book titled "Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists." The image shows a smiling Franklin wearing a military helmet and vest and an American flag on his arm. He's standing in a helicopter, firing a weapon toward a boat carrying packages and a man holding a gun.

"For your Christmas wish list," he wrote above the post, an apparent attempt to make light of deadly U.S. military strikes on suspected drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean.

in reply to MicroWave

The next installment is "Franklin is brought up on war crimes"… put it on your Christmas list!
in reply to MicroWave

Hegseth got the US flags oriented such that Franklin appears to be retreating.


Princess Aiko's popularity sparks calls to change Japan's male-only succession law


Japan’s beloved Princess Aiko is often cheered like a pop star.

During a visit to Nagasaki with Emperor Naruhito and Empress Masako, the sound of her name being screamed by well-wishers along the roads overwhelmed the cheers for her parents.

As she turns 24 on Monday, her supporters want to change Japan’s male-only succession law, which prohibits Aiko, the emperor’s only child, from becoming monarch.

Along with frustration that the discussion on succession rules has stalled, there’s a sense of urgency. Japan’s shrinking monarchy is on the brink of extinction. Naruhito’s teenage nephew is the only eligible heir from the younger generation.

https://apnews.com/article/japan-princess-aiko-monarchy-succession-12eb5163a88d22f292ae79e4407f1edf

Questa voce è stata modificata (1 settimana fa)
in reply to MicroWave

These monarchists enjoy hurting themselves all day, can't relate.
in reply to MicroWave

I personally don't care either way about the Japanese monarchy. The reality is that the monarchy today is purely symbolic and it's only kept because the Japanese people want it to be there. Japanese culture is very big on traditions like this and I highly doubt that any attempts to change the line of succession is going to happen. Like with many things in Japan, there's probably more interest in changing the line of succession outside of Japan than there is inside of it.


Canadian air passenger traffic to U.S. down for 9th consecutive month


For the ninth consecutive month, fewer passengers at Canadian airports are heading to the United States amid the trade war.

New data from Statistics Canada shows total Canadian air passenger traffic in October was up by 4.5 per cent to five million travellers from the same time last year, but the number of people on U.S.-bound trips is down 8.9 per cent to 1.2 million travellers.

in reply to Sahwa

Everyone considering visiting the US should ask themselves some serious questions: is my visit so important that it’s worth the risk of being jailed for years? What if I unknowingly break an insignificant law and catch ICEs attention? Do my skin color/religious beliefs put me at greater risk of abuse? What are the possible repercussions for the people I’m visiting, and my loved ones back home?

They can talk about numbers being “down”, but frankly, 1.2 million is WAY too fucking many.



How I discovered a hidden microphone on a Chinese NanoKVM


in reply to Retro_unlimited

No critical thinking I guess. How the hell would a KVM flash your BIOS or more likely UEFI.
in reply to Auli

It could probably change the language selector.

If I'm an elite hacker spy who works for the hacker spy division of the Chinese army, am I going to change the system language of the thing I am hacking to Chinese and forget to change it back?


in reply to Arun Shah™

i would love them to give us nuclear blocking that actually works across all instances (granted there are less jerks on fediverse but it doesn't hurt to plan)


Samsung reveals first tri-fold phone


Samsung reveals first tri-fold phone #
phonescoop.com/articles/articl…
in reply to YaGirlAutumn

Because when you break it, the repair costs will keep funneling money back to them. I guess.


in reply to return2ozma

i searched this topic a little bit to see what could be the worst consequences at ground level and the worst I found
((much smaller than what was described by another user @givesomefucks here)) was this :

::: spoiler spoiler
Ground-induced electric fields

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_we…

Magnetic storm activity can induce geoelectric fields in the Earth's conducting lithosphere.[26] Corresponding voltage differentials can find their way into electric power grids through ground connections, driving uncontrolled electric currents that interfere with grid operation, damage transformers, trip protective relays, and sometimes cause blackouts.[27] This complicated chain of causes and effects was demonstrated during the magnetic storm of March 1989,[28] which caused the complete collapse of the Hydro-Québec electric-power grid in Canada, temporarily leaving nine million people without electricity. The possible occurrence of an even more intense storm[29] led to operational standards intended to mitigate induction-hazard risks, while reinsurance companies commissioned revised risk assessments.
[30]:::

Here, the collapse of the power grid was not caused by terribly energetic phenomena(s) but rather, lack of oversight about ground fault protection devices ... that has been corrected since then.

in reply to return2ozma

Yay! More Auroras!

Fuck, I love the sun. I hope it kills us all.

Questa voce è stata modificata (1 settimana fa)



in reply to themachinestops

Too hard to make up bullshit for report so we will have AI make up the bullshit for us.
in reply to themachinestops

Newfoundland and Labrador is the province involved.

Had to read far too deep into the poorly written article to find that important bit of context.


in reply to vextuu

Are you looking for a VPN or are you looking for an IPv6 tunnel broker like Hurricane Electric?
in reply to vextuu

From what I've read, he primary concern with VPNs that do not support IPv6 is leakage. If a user’s device tries to access an IPv6 resource while connected to a VPN that only routes IPv4 traffic, the IPv6 packets can escape the VPN tunnel. This exposes the user's real IP address to external servers, undermining the privacy that the VPN is supposed to provide. Some servers have moved to strictly IPv6. Some servers only accept IPv4.

Some of you networking gods set me straight.


in reply to Hubi

Paywalling the API and therefore killing 3rd party apps killed reddit.. banning anyone with an opinion killed reddit..
in reply to Hubi

Nazi sympathizing has already ruined Reddit.

That shithole has been sanitized for advertisers, which means banning anyone who talks about resisting the fascist slide America is currently in but allows /r/conservative to exist for foreign actors to spread misinformation from.

Fuck Reddit, fuck Spez, those Nazi fucks will get what’s coming to them if we’re lucky.




After a teddy bear talked about kink, AI watchdogs are warning parents against smart toys


Advocates are fighting against the $16.7bn global smart-toy market, decrying surveillance and a lack of regulation
Advocates are fighting against the $16.7bn global smart-toy market, decrying surveillance and a lack of regulation


Plebbit is the the most decentralized selfhosted social media protocol And why development slowed Down


Why did development slow down?


We spent a long time debugging and stabilizing IPFS-related issues that affected content reliability.
These fixes were essential before building new features otherwise the protocol wouldn’t scale.

Is the team big?


No, the project is small, and the current budget only allows paying two developers.
Progress is steady but slower because everything is done properly instead of rushed.

How does anti-spam work?


Each community chooses its own challenge: captcha, crypto ENS, SMS, email OTP, or custom rules.
This keeps spam protection decentralized instead of relying on a global, platform-wide filter.

Why not use Mastodon/ActivityPub/Bluesky/Nostr/Farcaster/Steemit/Blockchain


mastodon / lemmy / activitypub
Instance admins can delete user accounts and communities. Instance admins can block other instances.

Bluesky instances cannot delete user accounts and communities (as long as they are backed up somewhere else), but they can block user accounts and communities.

plebbit solves each problem:


instances/hubs/rpcs cannot block a user account or community, because there are no instances, it's directly peer to peer. a community node can be run from home on consumer internet, no server, domain name, SSL, sync time, etc. it's as easy as running a bittorrent client.

it can scale infinitely because there are no historical ledger like a blockchain or hub, it's like bittorrent, if a community no longer has any seeds, it stops existing. (this is also a downside of plebbit, but scaling is more important, not scaling makes the system useless)
it has no cost to publish, like bittorrent, because is has no historical ledger that each node must sync. users seed their communities for free while they use it, like bittorrent.

a community node can communicate a challenge to a user to post to his community (like a minimum user account age, or karma, or a captcha, whitelist, etc), because it's directly peer to peer, the community node is the instance, so it can gatekeep it however it wants. (this is also a downside of plebbit, a community node must be online 24/7, but it's also possible to delegate running a node to an RPC/instance/hub, you just lose some censorship resistance, so it's not inferior in this regards, it's strictly superior because of the optionality).

Is this running on ETH?


the plebbit protocol itself it not a blockchain, it's a content addressed network like Bittorrent, built using IPFS/libp2p.

in reply to Esteban Abaroa

Until Plebbit fixes how god awful slow it is, I won't be interested in it. Lemmy is decentralized enough for me.
in reply to chronicledmonocle

Yes that's a problem on the web (working on it atm), but desktop apps should be much faster since it's pure p2p. Try out Seedit, github.com/plebbit/seedit
in reply to Esteban Abaroa

How is the hosting changed when needed (e.g., a different IPFS address)? What happens in a coordinated attack by someone with 51% of the seeds, can they overwrite all of the content? Is there any cryptographic way to ensure the content hasn’t been maliciously altered?

in reply to Damage

But now you have Meloni the actual fascist. Great job.
in reply to ohulancutash

Eh, until next election. We're still scheduled to have those here.


Veronica Explains why she doesn't stream (from Netflix etc) #algorithmic_helplessness_sucks


I'm one of those hipsters who doesn't use streaming services.

I did, a while ago, but I quit using them because the experience is kind of awful, and I'm happier now for it. I collect physical media and watch it using Jellyfin on my Linux-based home theater PC, and I'm completely satisfied with how it works.

I'm making this video because I am really troubled by algorithmic helplessness, and I feel like corporate-centralized streaming media makes that worse. Maybe this video will encourage someone else to cut the cord and rediscover an appreciation for owning your media and being choosy about what to "watch next". Or maybe I'm just wasting time. Who knows? I suppose, you know, you're reading this description, right?

If you read the description, say "algorithmic helplessness sucks" in the comments. That'll make me feel better.



I stream nothing, and I am happy.


I'm one of those hipsters who doesn't use streaming services.

I did, a while ago, but I quit using them because the experience is kind of awful, and I'm happier now for it. I collect physical media and watch it using Jellyfin on my Linux-based home theater PC, and I'm completely satisfied with how it works.

I'm making this video because I am really troubled by algorithmic helplessness, and I feel like corporate-centralized streaming media makes that worse. Maybe this video will encourage someone else to cut the cord and rediscover an appreciation for owning your media and being choosy about what to "watch next". Or maybe I'm just wasting time. Who knows? I suppose, you know, you're reading this description, right?

If you read the description, say "algorithmic helplessness sucks" in the comments. That'll make me feel better.

Oh right, I need to tell you about the things I mentioned in the video.

Software:
- MakeMKV: makemkv.com/
- To support MakeMKV and get all the advanced features: makemkv.com/buy/
- That LibreDrive forum post on the MakeMKV website which is hard to find (contains list of LibreDrive compatible drives): forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewto…
- Handbrake: handbrake.fr/
- Asunder: littlesvr.ca/asunder/
- Jellyfin: jellyfin.org/
- Kodi: kodi.tv
- Finamp (via GitHub): github.com/jmshrv/finamp

Hardware I mentioned - not sponsored and no affiliate links.
(These drives might not be currently available at Micro Center, but I'm providing these links as they're probably the most helpful if you want to find one yourself.)
- My LG portable Blu-Ray drive, a BP60NB10: microcenter.com/product/607144…
- And my internal Asus BW-16D1HT drive: microcenter.com/product/435513…
- FLIRC receiver (I don't remember if I bought it here but maybe): pishop.us/product/flirc-rpi-us…

Other links of note:
- 13 minutes of videotaped footage of the Wii Netflix app:
- Video about smart TVs by @[url=https://indieweb.social/users/lonseidman]Lon Seidman / Lon.TV ☑️[/url] :
- My PeerTube (watch this video without ads or tracking): tinkerbetter.tube/c/veronicaex…
- My blog post about how I use Handbrake: vkc.sh/handbrake-2025/

Lastly, links to support my very unsponsored videos:
- Patreon: patreon.com/VeronicaExplains
- Ko-Fi: ko-fi.com/VeronicaExplains
- Bandcamp: thestopbits.bandcamp.com

Chapters:
0:00 My motivation for ditching streaming
3:21 Physical media is awesome
4:05 Ripping media
5:59 Serving with Jellyfin
7:09 Bookstores and libraries are lit (get it?)
8:10 I don't want an algorithm programming us.


Questa voce è stata modificata (2 settimane fa)
in reply to bluemoon

I'm all for this, but acquiring the media outside of streaming services in the first place is difficult, likely by design. There's no GOG for movies and TV; there's not even a Steam. My wife is basically permanently subscribed to Peacock because she loves Law and Order: SVU, to the point that she basically has the whole series on loop while she knits. I started looking this time last year into how to self-host all that, but I didn't even get to the point of finding out what Jellyfin is before I realized that it was impossible to legally acquire all the seasons on Blu Ray or even DVD. They want me to either subscribe to Peacock or buy a "digital copy", which is just rental streaming by another name. I'm not a skilled enough pirate to know that my ISP isn't going to mind my activity, and being a skilled pirate isn't even something I'm interested in being. Plus, my past experiences with piracy is that beggars can't be choosers, and the bit rate could be awful, or it would have huge watermarks from whatever Canadian channel the pirate recorded from, and that's not a great experience when it's supposed to be a gift anyway.

Unlike the video author, I'm not even bothered by algorithmic recommendations for media. I actually like it. The main reason I want to self host my media is because I don't watch so much of it that a subscription price makes sense very often. If my wife and I are just watching the same couple of things over and over again, why do I need a buffet of content I'm not going to watch at monthly subscription prices?

in reply to ampersandrew

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

Oh, I forgot the other part of my rant when it comes to acquiring the content. Brick and mortar doesn't carry Blu Rays anymore. Maybe Walmart does, but I don't have one near me. Target and Best Buy stopped. I have a functional mall near me, but not one store in it sells movies, and when I asked, they looked at me like I had two heads.
in reply to ampersandrew

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.

in reply to bluemoon

My watch parties already basically dried up. The movie industry is crumbling in front of us for not being able to adapt to what their audience actually wants, and I end up just spending my time in other ways, because they're offering me poor value and too much friction (VPNs and torrents) to get what I want, and that's what my rant is. They'll adapt or die. Right now, it's looking like the movie industry will die. You're making a lot of assumptions there about offloading my decision making to AI though...
in reply to BeeegScaaawyCripple

Some friends and I got together and watched Weapons for Halloween (on a friend's jellyfin server) and we had a great time
in reply to ampersandrew

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

Yeah, I'm aware. This is a problem that the movie and TV industry don't appear to be interested in solving. And they seemingly operate as a massive cartel, so one studio isn't about to break out on its own and innovate with a DRM free movie store.
in reply to ampersandrew

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.

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in reply to ampersandrew

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.

in reply to BananaTrifleViolin

I don't even mind that there are so many different streaming services. It's still a far better version of cable, where I can opt into ad-free for a few more dollars and sign up for or cancel a given service at will without having to have all of them. What sucks is when it's the only legal distribution channel and I can't make the choice that's right for me based on my consumption, like buying just the movies and shows I want and playing them how I want. Demonstrated in the video, we still need what can most accurately be categorized as a workaround or a hack to even rip our own Blu Rays. All that plus the streaming services have raised their prices beyond the point where it's an attractive deal.


Threads alternative


Threads have been gaining traction recently and I’m actually enjoying the atmosphere there. However it’s clearly on a growth phase where they don’t show any ads or paid content. This obviously won’t last, so I’m wondering if there’s a platform which I could recommend?

I tried Mastodon a couple of years ago but it felt a bit too technical even for me, so I’m a bit hesitant to explore that. Thanks for any input and my apologies if this has been asked too many times already.

in reply to ptu

I prefer Iceshrimp and Sharkey to Mastodon, antennas can help to find content
in reply to ptu

you don't even need mastodon; you can also try wafrn, which is more like tumblr, misskey/sharkey, which is more like blogger or livejournal, or even piefed/lemmy.

they all talk to each other.



WHO recommends GLP-1 drugs for obesity


in reply to return2ozma

That's a very sensible recommendation, especially since the evidence of the benefits regarding helping prevent diseases like diabetes, heart attack and stroke that follow from obesity is overwhelming.
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in reply to Lee Duna

Canada sells weapons to Israel and still their citizens get treated like this. Maybe stop giving them guns?
in reply to FordBeeblebrox

Our “liberal” government is indistinguishable from 80s/90s conservatives.

in reply to essell

LLMs are based in computing hardware that does not engage in sexual reproduction and is thus not subject to evolution by natural selection.


Hong Kong’s Response to Deadly Fire Is Squeezed by China’s Firm Hand


cross-posted from: mander.xyz/post/42837641

Web archived link

...

On Sunday, thousands of people had gathered outside the charred buildings in Hong Kong’s Tai Po district to lay flowers and leave mementos and messages such as “rest in peace” and “Hong Kong be strong.” At a plaza at the complex, people manning a local relief effort collected donations and distributed essentials such as clothing, bedding, diapers and food to residents displaced by the fire.

By Sunday evening, the donation booths were gone, replaced by police command tents.

Government authorities have stepped in with official relief measures and sanctioned mourning activities, such as flying flags at half-staff and the establishment of designated condolence sites.

Beijing’s national-security office in Hong Kong warned that any attempt to exploit the fire to create disorder would be punished by law. The office said anti‑China groups and individuals were spreading false information, undermining relief efforts and inciting resentment toward the government and its leaders.

Alleged rabble-rousers are “attempting to use the victims’ grief to advance their political ambitions, pushing Hong Kong back into the turmoil of the extradition-bill unrest and reviving the darkest days of violent unrest,” the security office said.

“Darkest days” refers to the months of protests and violent unrest in Hong Kong in 2019 that were sparked by a proposed law that would allow the extradition of suspects for prosecution in mainland China.

...

A petition circulated online by activists demanded an independent investigation of the fire that goes beyond construction materials and addresses how Hong Kong is run. The list of demands in the petition echoed the protest chants of 2019.

The Hong Kong Centre for Human Rights, a group of rights advocates, said that the national-security laws may keep people from expressing opinions about what happened. “They fear questions regarding the cause and handling of the disaster could be deemed as sedition,” the group said.

...

https://www.wsj.com/world/china/hong-kongs-response-to-deadly-fire-is-squeezed-by-chinas-firm-hand-ea01b5a2




Hakboard - Home Assistant Integration for Kanboard


cross-posted from: discuss.online/post/31434838

Reddit post

HAKboard, a comprehensive Home Assistant integration for Kanboard, a free and open source Kanban project management tool.
- Roadmap
- Repo
- Screenshots

Features:

Interactive Lovelace cards

Integrates project, task and people data into sensor entities

Documented entity schema aids in dashboard and automation development

Supports multiple instances, enabling blue/green deployment

Configurable replication and project filtering settings per Kanboard instance

Zero YAML editing required

Functionality:

In this initial release, it is a one-way sync of Kanboard data into HA, with deep-linking to Kanboard projects from the HA dashboard. It will create an entity for every project that provides aggregate data for tasks, task status, assignees, columns etc.. giving you an excellent birds eye view of your environment, as well as the ability to create automations from the sensor data.

A very near release (see Roadmap in the repo) will introduce the creation of entities for each task and person, and likely others. We wanted to ensure the core entity generation system is rock-solid before opening it up to potentially thousands of new entities and thought it prudent to stagger this functionality.

If you use Kanboard (or want to try it), this turns your HA dashboard into a real-time project hub.

Repo & Docs: github.com/aktive/hakboard

⚠️ IMPORTANT INSTALL NOTES: I'm still working through the HACS repo approval process. In the meantime, please follow these instructions if you would like to install (existing Kanboard server required):

HACS > ⚙️ (Top right) > Custom Repositories > Add: https://github.com/aktive/hakboard as type Integration

Configure your Kanboard instance via Settings (Bottom left) > Devices & services > Add (Bottom right) > Search for HAKboard

NOTE: If HAKboard does not appear (either as an integration or a dashboard card), please refresh your browser or restart HA.


Thinkpad Yoga X1 gen 6 pen not functioning


I need to aggregate a lot of details on what I've tried so far, but I figured I'd make this post now since I have time over lunch.

I purchased a used Thinkpad Yoga X1 gen 6 from a university surplus sale. Intending to move away from the data hoarder that is Microsoft I of course installed Linux. I decided on Linux Mint since I haven't touched Linux in about a decade and I've forgotten everything.

Everything that I need to use correctly for job applications, printing, etc is working just fine, but much of the reason I bought the yoga is to use the Wacom stylus pen for drawing and taking notes.

It was working in Windows, but now does not seem to be recognized in Linux. It's odd since the touchscreen does work.

I did find this post which I will try to follow tonight:
reddit.com/r/LinuxOnThinkpad/c…

If anyone has had experience with this or has some advice for a new newbie, I'd very much appreciate it!


in reply to ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆

Bro you can’t beat Ukraine. What makes you think you can beat Ukraine + NATO allied countries?
in reply to hddsx

Russia is currently beating Ukraine + NATO support, I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
in reply to hddsx

Bro, the fact that you think this is a war between Russia and Ukraine as opposed to a proxy war between Russia and NATO shows how detached from reality you are.


Thousands protest in Philippines against flood control fraud


Thousands marched in the Philippine capital on Sunday (Nov 30) demanding jail time for scores of officials, lawmakers and construction firm owners accused of pocketing billions of taxpayer dollars in a sweeping corruption scandal.


Israeli president concerned over proposed renaming of park


cross-posted from: lemmy.zip/post/54134551

The Office of the President of Israel has expressed concern over the proposed renaming of Herzog Park in south Dublin.




Airbus faces new quality problem on dozens of A320 jets: Sources


Airbus has discovered an industrial quality issue affecting fuselage panels of several dozen A320-family aircraft, industry sources said on Monday (Dec 1).
in reply to schizoidman

Airbus: None of them have escaped the manufacturer without remedies to correct them, it's just causing delays to our customers.

Boeing: Just release them anyways and kill the whistleblower(s).

in reply to Lasherz

Yep. World of difference.

One incident of something strange happening resulted in full diagnosis, and a software update that could be applied with about 3 hours downtime for most craft.


in reply to MicroWave

I think this should be for UK pensioners but for EU pensioners there should be some cost exchange mechanism between the countries that covers it.
in reply to realitista

I suggest you read the article. Your questions will be answered.
in reply to MicroWave

My father is an European retirée in France, he pays a solidarity surplus for healthcare. So it's not free. Nor should it be.
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EU tells Trump: You can’t pardon Putin for war crimes in Ukraine


Any move to “wipe the slate clean” for Russia in a peace deal would be “a historic mistake of huge proportions,” the EU justice commissioner tells POLITICO.

Donald Trump’s drive to secure peace in Ukraine must not let Vladimir Putin off the hook for war crimes committed by Russian forces, a top EU official has warned, effectively setting a new red line for a deal.

In an interview with POLITICO, Michael McGrath, the European commissioner for justice and democracy, said negotiators must ensure the push for a ceasefire does not result in Russia escaping prosecution.

His comments reflect concerns widely held in European capitals that the original American blueprint for a deal included the promise of a “full amnesty for actions committed during the war,” alongside plans to reintegrate Russia into the world economy.

in reply to MicroWave

Yes he can. Trump can do whatever he wants. Like rape children. Or, pretend to be the king of the world. Or commit war crimes. Or take naps during meetings.