I've got a NordVPN subscription and use Transmission to download torrents.
Don't use Nord. They got hacked and didn't notify their users for 2 years.
I’d recommend for general viewing of Movies and TV shows to use Stremio with the community addon Torrentio and get realdebird.
If you can’t find whatever you want on Stremio specifically then you can just paste the magnet link of the torrent into the search box and it will stream it.
A VPN isn’t really that necessary tbh but is a nice to have.
Music Piracy I honestly have no idea about now, if I wanted music to be free I’d just be using Spotify/YouTube in a browser with Ublock origin.
Reading this from piracy instance✌️
I heard it from someone (not me) that they've been using a modded spotify app downloaded from apkmody.io for more than a year now and it's basically free spotify premium. They (again, not me) say its pretty damn good, unbelievably good actually. They (NOT me) are pretty happy with it.
Would these people (that aren't you) say that you can use your normal Spotify account or do you have to start over?
When I came across the app (I think it was on reddit), users were recommending that you set up another account in case Spotify catches on and bans your account (so you don't lose your favs/playlists/etc)
And that's what those people (not me) did, they set their original account playlists to public so they can be accessed by the second account.
However for as long as they (not me) have been using that app nothing has happened to their account.
Also just checked, they (not me) have been using that app since august 2021 with zero problems.
Mind you, I still use it because it's pretty much the only option apart from YouTube front ends on mobile, but I would advise being very careful with the permissions you give it.
Yikes! didn’t know that! Really wish that there were youtube front ends with last.fm support, because i would switch from spotify in an INSTANT if there were. if invidious or piped just added the ability to scrobble i would cancel my spotify right now
You'll own nothing and be happy.
I hate that this has been co-opted by "Jews control the world" people, because it is an apt and concise way of describing how shitty everything is going; some car manufacturers are brazen enough to charge a subscription fee for headed seats, and it's probably gonna stick and become the norm in maybe 10 years
Somebody will crack and release
Yeah but it would be like console hacking or jailbreaking, most people won't bother with getting it free so they will sustain the market pressure
It's only gonna get worse.....so we have that to look forward to
I don't get what the alternative is supposed to be. You can't make stuff like blockbuster quality movies on ads and/or donations alone. And between ads vs subscriptions, ads are iffy because you end up with sketchy or unethical advertisements. Plus ad blockers make it hard to sustain a business on just ads.
In an ideal world, nobody would need to "make a living" and we'd be able to offer more services for free. But we don't have that ideal world. Musicians, animators, writers, programmers and more all need to get paid somehow.
It's admittedly annoying how fractured subscriptions get, though. I miss when Netflix was the only streaming video subscription I needed. Now there's half a dozen major services and they all want exclusive contracts to show certain movies and TV.
Personally, I'm happy to pay for the stuff I use a lot. Which includes stuff that I don't even have to pay for (eg, I donated $20 to kbin). It does suck for stuff I only want a little of, though. eg, I don't have any news subscriptions because I only check news sites here and there and it's almost never the same site, too (mostly I get linked from sites like this). I want to see subscriptions become a bit more centralized, spanning multiple sites to account for this.
How about buying and owning things?
But we don't have that ideal world.
Steal everything until we do
When cable TV was first a thing, it was advertised as extra content and with NO commercials. Pay us money, we'll give you a big bundle of channels, and you won't have to see commercials anymore.
Then they started adding more and more commercials in. Nowadays, a half-hour slot is 1/3rd commercials, and probably another 15% of that time is credits and "previously on" or "before the break" or pointless shitty padding
Then Netflix came out. Pay us a monthly fee, you can see all this content whenever you want, no commercials.
Then everyone wanted a slice of Netflix's pie, and now we have a dozen separate streaming services you all have to pay monthly fees for.
The solution is Cable TV 2.0. Compile it all back into one service, charge a higher fee, cut all the ads out (again). Call it Fiber TV or something, idk. Otherwise people will realize it's easier to pirate shit again than to navigate and pay for 8 different streaming services
I just want to own stuff. I wanna pay for the series and music I like once and then have them forever. The problem with subscription gated media is that the subscription will eventually go away, and then so will the media. You will have paid hundreds over multiple years for it, but you will have nothing of it once it shuts down.
for me, it's far more about it being recurring than paying itself. I pay for software and media all the time. I just don't like having to pay over and over when i'm likely only occasionally using these services
Yea I have nothing against selling and buying CDs, Vinyls or DVDs because then you atleast own a copy of the media
If only super intelligent dinosaurs that could recycle things for us and could remove the need for jobs, came in our planet. We'd have more time making Marvel movies too.
I think what would work best in an ideal scenario would be a free and independent platform. Something like Wikipedia or something.
Part of the subscription would be to keep the platform itself up and running, and anyone like Netflix, Disney, Fox, whomever would be able to upload their movies/shows/etc there, with no discrimination.
Payment could be the platform maintenance fee + access to the library of shows (and here more popular creators could get a bigger share of the pie) or it could be maintenace fee + paying for shows individually.
the boss move of: just pirating it, at least then you'll actually have the physical files
We have to fight back against this. Remember the Horse Armor DLC? Everyone laughed... now look at shit. The best defense against this is an offense. Make this shit taboo and anyone who buys into it a fucking buffoon, socially.
I wish they would just let me buy shit lmao
It was annoying with streaming cable replacements but I got it, I was replacing one overpriced subscription with a few lower priced ones. Now it’s mostly break even on that. I’m happy to have YoutubeTV, I split it with two friends and it works for me…
But lately it has been software subscriptions that have pushed me over the edge. I now have AllTrails, Strava, Adobe Photoshop / Lightroom, Silverstack XT, Xero, Mailfence, so on and so on… some days feels like my brain is gonna pop when the charges go through.
yeah I feel you I started getting rid of all my subscriptions about a year ago, I just went back to lightroom 6 which I own already and got rid of photoshop, I didnt use it for anything professional just making memes so I just use photopea for that. then for streaming I just setup a plex server and learned about usenet. I also started looking for software like davinci resolve instead of premiere pro, the old version of sketchup that they offer for free instead of the new cloud based one that I use for planning home remodeling. then I just started cancelling things that were nice to have but didnt really need, like the google play pass just because I wanted to fight against subscriptions and went and built a modded game boy advance instead
It's quite similar to when I used to run a small cafe and people would say "you can make this yourself", "you can make that yourself" instead of buying stuff in - then they would say "if it hasn't sold by the end of the day, you can just eat it yourself - you don't have to throw it away".
Yes - that was fine when it was just egg mayonnaise. But then Tuna mayonnaise, and Chicken mayonnaise and then grated cheese, and ham....
When am I going to have time to eat all these unsold sandwich fillings? Oh and cakes, and scones....
A small amount is fine.
A few subscription services is fine.
But gradually EVERYTHING wants you to pay a "fair" monthly fee. Until you are spending more on these monthly fees, than you are on the electricity bill!
i hate subsribsion
BASED
I recently dislodged 100/month in subscriptions
I keep a little note file so I can keep it from getting out of control.
A small suggestion, only because using monthly prices sometimes makes things seem even cheaper than they are. Change it from $Monthly Cost to $Monthly Cost ($Annual Cost). For example instead of $11/mo for Apple Music it would be $11 ($132) and instead of $33 it would be $33 ($396).
Doing this caused me to re-evaluate a number of monthly subscriptions I had, find cheaper (sometimes even free/"good enough") alternatives. Other times it would make me realize I should update annual charges if it was available if it was something I planned to keep around anyway and the annual price was a good enough deal. It also causes you to re-evaluate which price tier you pay for. Like for Nitro - do you really need the extra perks for $84/yr or do you only actually care about emotes and slightly larger file uploads and the $3/mo Basic package would be good enough? Often times people go "Oh it's only $7/mo difference anyway" and get the better package but don't actually use the extra features they're paying for.
I need nitro because my mom and I play the activities every weekend (we live far apart).
its free now i think
Yep VERY happy about that.
For real? That seems crazy to me, the only monthly charges I have are my phone bill and my gym membership. I've been tempted to get some services, like Hulu when I heard they got Community and that one Youtuber-shilled one that (if you used an oft-promoted coupon code) you get a full years subscription to their two streaming services which said Youtubers contributed exclusive videos/whole series there, but ultimately I never thought it was worth it and if I ever actually wanted to watch something I would search it on one of those pirate streaming sites or just torrent it.
What kind of services do you end up spending for? Video streaming, Spotify, or utility stuff like dropbox?
do note that most of community is now available for the free on youtube and has been available for free on piracy websites for a looong time
Eh. Better than ads. At the end of the day streaming services, at least, are never going to be able to run on just donations.
Adblockers and piracy will let you have it for free AND with no ads.
Would it be possible for everyone to switch to piracy? Could the current piracy infrastructure support that? I've never actually considered that. Video is heavy.
Of course, if that's where we're going as a society we're going to need a new way to fund productions. That's not a bad thing, the artificial scarcity model we have is dumb. Maybe state-funded agencies like the BBC could massively expand.
Would it be possible for everyone to switch to piracy? Could the current piracy infrastructure support that? I’ve never actually considered that. Video is heavy.
I mean if everyone was using the same streaming or torrenting site probably not, but there are so many different sites to use that honestly I wouldn't be surprised. If you do start pirating there are sites that are specifically for streaming shows, just make sure you have an adblocker or you're gonna see a lot of porn ads. Also make sure to know what you're downloading if torrenting, I'm not gonna get into the finer points on how to not get a virus or a cease & desist from your ISP if you go down that route, but there are plenty of details on that if you just look for it.
Ahh, so they use ads to pay for costs too. We've come full circle.
I mean yeah but again, adblockers.
Pirates vs. adblock users go.
Somehow that's an ironic fight.
Pirates vs. adblock users go.
Somehow that's an ironic fight.
I don't pay for any of these.
Thank god you can play (and update) Zelda without online subscription. Once that is gone, i'll go postal.
Hey Google, disable up selling.
Did you want to listen to that on YouTube music and start your free trial?
yarr 🏴☠️
Any advice on where to start for a novice pirate... And i mean brand spankin new
the wiki at !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com can help you get started
https://fmhy.pages.dev/
I've got a NordVPN subscription and use Transmission to download torrents.
Don't use Nord. They got hacked and didn't notify their users for 2 years.
I’d recommend for general viewing of Movies and TV shows to use Stremio with the community addon Torrentio and get realdebird. If you can’t find whatever you want on Stremio specifically then you can just paste the magnet link of the torrent into the search box and it will stream it.
A VPN isn’t really that necessary tbh but is a nice to have.
Music Piracy I honestly have no idea about now, if I wanted music to be free I’d just be using Spotify/YouTube in a browser with Ublock origin.
Reading this from piracy instance✌️
I heard it from someone (not me) that they've been using a modded spotify app downloaded from apkmody.io for more than a year now and it's basically free spotify premium. They (again, not me) say its pretty damn good, unbelievably good actually. They (NOT me) are pretty happy with it.
Would these people (that aren't you) say that you can use your normal Spotify account or do you have to start over?
When I came across the app (I think it was on reddit), users were recommending that you set up another account in case Spotify catches on and bans your account (so you don't lose your favs/playlists/etc)
And that's what those people (not me) did, they set their original account playlists to public so they can be accessed by the second account.
However for as long as they (not me) have been using that app nothing has happened to their account.
Also just checked, they (not me) have been using that app since august 2021 with zero problems.
use your normal spotify account and use xmanager spotify https://github.com/Team-xManager/xManager
to my knowledge there have never been any bans for it
xManager is a bit sus IMO because they claim their installer is open source while consisting of 15000 lines of unreadable machine-generated Java code: https://github.com/Team-xManager/xManager/blob/main/app/src/main/java/com/xc3fff0e/xmanager/MainActivity.java
They are also quite opposed to publishing the source code of the actual Spotify patches for rather vague reasons: https://github.com/Team-xManager/xManager/issues/324
Mind you, I still use it because it's pretty much the only option apart from YouTube front ends on mobile, but I would advise being very careful with the permissions you give it.
Yikes! didn’t know that! Really wish that there were youtube front ends with last.fm support, because i would switch from spotify in an INSTANT if there were. if invidious or piped just added the ability to scrobble i would cancel my spotify right now
You'll own nothing and be happy.
I hate that this has been co-opted by "Jews control the world" people, because it is an apt and concise way of describing how shitty everything is going; some car manufacturers are brazen enough to charge a subscription fee for headed seats, and it's probably gonna stick and become the norm in maybe 10 years
Somebody will crack and release
Yeah but it would be like console hacking or jailbreaking, most people won't bother with getting it free so they will sustain the market pressure
It's only gonna get worse.....so we have that to look forward to
I don't get what the alternative is supposed to be. You can't make stuff like blockbuster quality movies on ads and/or donations alone. And between ads vs subscriptions, ads are iffy because you end up with sketchy or unethical advertisements. Plus ad blockers make it hard to sustain a business on just ads.
In an ideal world, nobody would need to "make a living" and we'd be able to offer more services for free. But we don't have that ideal world. Musicians, animators, writers, programmers and more all need to get paid somehow.
It's admittedly annoying how fractured subscriptions get, though. I miss when Netflix was the only streaming video subscription I needed. Now there's half a dozen major services and they all want exclusive contracts to show certain movies and TV.
Personally, I'm happy to pay for the stuff I use a lot. Which includes stuff that I don't even have to pay for (eg, I donated $20 to kbin). It does suck for stuff I only want a little of, though. eg, I don't have any news subscriptions because I only check news sites here and there and it's almost never the same site, too (mostly I get linked from sites like this). I want to see subscriptions become a bit more centralized, spanning multiple sites to account for this.
How about buying and owning things?
Steal everything until we do
When cable TV was first a thing, it was advertised as extra content and with NO commercials. Pay us money, we'll give you a big bundle of channels, and you won't have to see commercials anymore.
Then they started adding more and more commercials in. Nowadays, a half-hour slot is 1/3rd commercials, and probably another 15% of that time is credits and "previously on" or "before the break" or pointless shitty padding
Then Netflix came out. Pay us a monthly fee, you can see all this content whenever you want, no commercials.
Then everyone wanted a slice of Netflix's pie, and now we have a dozen separate streaming services you all have to pay monthly fees for.
The solution is Cable TV 2.0. Compile it all back into one service, charge a higher fee, cut all the ads out (again). Call it Fiber TV or something, idk. Otherwise people will realize it's easier to pirate shit again than to navigate and pay for 8 different streaming services
I just want to own stuff. I wanna pay for the series and music I like once and then have them forever. The problem with subscription gated media is that the subscription will eventually go away, and then so will the media. You will have paid hundreds over multiple years for it, but you will have nothing of it once it shuts down.
for me, it's far more about it being recurring than paying itself. I pay for software and media all the time. I just don't like having to pay over and over when i'm likely only occasionally using these services
Yea I have nothing against selling and buying CDs, Vinyls or DVDs because then you atleast own a copy of the media
If only super intelligent dinosaurs that could recycle things for us and could remove the need for jobs, came in our planet. We'd have more time making Marvel movies too.
I think what would work best in an ideal scenario would be a free and independent platform. Something like Wikipedia or something.
Part of the subscription would be to keep the platform itself up and running, and anyone like Netflix, Disney, Fox, whomever would be able to upload their movies/shows/etc there, with no discrimination.
Payment could be the platform maintenance fee + access to the library of shows (and here more popular creators could get a bigger share of the pie) or it could be maintenace fee + paying for shows individually.
the boss move of: just pirating it, at least then you'll actually have the physical files
We have to fight back against this. Remember the Horse Armor DLC? Everyone laughed... now look at shit. The best defense against this is an offense. Make this shit taboo and anyone who buys into it a fucking buffoon, socially.
I wish they would just let me buy shit lmao
It was annoying with streaming cable replacements but I got it, I was replacing one overpriced subscription with a few lower priced ones. Now it’s mostly break even on that. I’m happy to have YoutubeTV, I split it with two friends and it works for me…
But lately it has been software subscriptions that have pushed me over the edge. I now have AllTrails, Strava, Adobe Photoshop / Lightroom, Silverstack XT, Xero, Mailfence, so on and so on… some days feels like my brain is gonna pop when the charges go through.
yeah I feel you I started getting rid of all my subscriptions about a year ago, I just went back to lightroom 6 which I own already and got rid of photoshop, I didnt use it for anything professional just making memes so I just use photopea for that. then for streaming I just setup a plex server and learned about usenet. I also started looking for software like davinci resolve instead of premiere pro, the old version of sketchup that they offer for free instead of the new cloud based one that I use for planning home remodeling. then I just started cancelling things that were nice to have but didnt really need, like the google play pass just because I wanted to fight against subscriptions and went and built a modded game boy advance instead
It's quite similar to when I used to run a small cafe and people would say "you can make this yourself", "you can make that yourself" instead of buying stuff in - then they would say "if it hasn't sold by the end of the day, you can just eat it yourself - you don't have to throw it away".
Yes - that was fine when it was just egg mayonnaise. But then Tuna mayonnaise, and Chicken mayonnaise and then grated cheese, and ham....
When am I going to have time to eat all these unsold sandwich fillings? Oh and cakes, and scones....
A small amount is fine.
A few subscription services is fine.
But gradually EVERYTHING wants you to pay a "fair" monthly fee. Until you are spending more on these monthly fees, than you are on the electricity bill!
i hate subsribsion BASED
I recently dislodged 100/month in subscriptions
I keep a little note file so I can keep it from getting out of control.
A small suggestion, only because using monthly prices sometimes makes things seem even cheaper than they are. Change it from
$Monthly Costto$Monthly Cost ($Annual Cost). For example instead of $11/mo for Apple Music it would be $11 ($132) and instead of $33 it would be $33 ($396).Doing this caused me to re-evaluate a number of monthly subscriptions I had, find cheaper (sometimes even free/"good enough") alternatives. Other times it would make me realize I should update annual charges if it was available if it was something I planned to keep around anyway and the annual price was a good enough deal. It also causes you to re-evaluate which price tier you pay for. Like for Nitro - do you really need the extra perks for $84/yr or do you only actually care about emotes and slightly larger file uploads and the $3/mo Basic package would be good enough? Often times people go "Oh it's only $7/mo difference anyway" and get the better package but don't actually use the extra features they're paying for.
I need nitro because my mom and I play the activities every weekend (we live far apart).
its free now i think
Yep VERY happy about that.
For real? That seems crazy to me, the only monthly charges I have are my phone bill and my gym membership. I've been tempted to get some services, like Hulu when I heard they got Community and that one Youtuber-shilled one that (if you used an oft-promoted coupon code) you get a full years subscription to their two streaming services which said Youtubers contributed exclusive videos/whole series there, but ultimately I never thought it was worth it and if I ever actually wanted to watch something I would search it on one of those pirate streaming sites or just torrent it.
What kind of services do you end up spending for? Video streaming, Spotify, or utility stuff like dropbox?
do note that most of community is now available for the free on youtube and has been available for free on piracy websites for a looong time
Eh. Better than ads. At the end of the day streaming services, at least, are never going to be able to run on just donations.
Adblockers and piracy will let you have it for free AND with no ads.
Would it be possible for everyone to switch to piracy? Could the current piracy infrastructure support that? I've never actually considered that. Video is heavy.
Of course, if that's where we're going as a society we're going to need a new way to fund productions. That's not a bad thing, the artificial scarcity model we have is dumb. Maybe state-funded agencies like the BBC could massively expand.
I mean if everyone was using the same streaming or torrenting site probably not, but there are so many different sites to use that honestly I wouldn't be surprised. If you do start pirating there are sites that are specifically for streaming shows, just make sure you have an adblocker or you're gonna see a lot of porn ads. Also make sure to know what you're downloading if torrenting, I'm not gonna get into the finer points on how to not get a virus or a cease & desist from your ISP if you go down that route, but there are plenty of details on that if you just look for it.
Ahh, so they use ads to pay for costs too. We've come full circle.
I mean yeah but again, adblockers.
Pirates vs. adblock users go.
Somehow that's an ironic fight.
Pirates vs. adblock users go.
Somehow that's an ironic fight.
I don't pay for any of these.
Thank god you can play (and update) Zelda without online subscription. Once that is gone, i'll go postal.
Hey Google, disable up selling.