https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_M_uvDChJQ

Since it was completely server-hosted it was incredibly fast. You’d open it up and boom, everything all up to date. The search was fantastic. (Say what you will about Google but they’ve always been great at search. Very fast and very good results.) The site layout was clean and minimal. It was just a really good implementation. Of course they murdered it.

If you used Gmail in the early days, and ever used something before it, you probably had a moment where you said “wow, this is what email should have been all along”. Reader was the same.

That’s what I did! Over time I stopped looking at Feedly though. I replaced it with Reddit and Twitter mainly. Now that those sites have become Pure Evil I switched over to Apple News. I already pay for the Plus thing as part of the family bundle so might as well use it. The “Following” tab works like a personally-curated RSS feed list. If you want an algorithmic approach, you can use the “Today” tab.

The one main feature it’s still lacking that I really want is a pure chronological list of everything from my Following sources/topics. I sent them feedback so I’m sure it will show up any time in the next 5-15 years.

You can download lossless with Apple Music and listen to it with no data connection.

Unfortunately the communities that I’m interested in didn’t really move. I tried very hard to just quit Reddit cold turkey, but instead I’ve dialed it back to only 4-5 core topics that I’m interested in. For general doomscrolling I mostly use Apple News now. I check Lemmy every day or two but it’s hard to get stuck in when the discussions I’m interested in aren’t really flourishing here. Hopefully it grows over time.

netflix has a plan with ads! https://help.netflix.com/en/node/126831

amazon uses prime video as a hook to get you to sign up for prime membership (which itself has been steadily increasing in price).

i’d be shocked if HBO didn’t introduce an ad-supported price tier at some point in the future. that totally seems like zaslav’s MO.

“buy your software and have it forever” was not really true other than in the very early days. everything that was in active development like office, photoshop, all the pro music software i used, was updated regularly and had an upgrade cost. my music app had a paid upgrade every year like clockwork for $150. it was essentially a subscription in all but name. yeah i could stop paying and stay with the last version forever but operating system and hardware advances would make it so those versions would stop running on newer machines eventually.

yep i have been a sodium citrate convert since i watched an adam ragusea video on the topic. https://piped.video/watch?v=KcM_MZoJWOo

i picked up a bag off amazon for cheap and it really is magic.

i’ve got a max size phone… can’t one hand it.

iPhone didn’t have native swipe keyboard until 2019. I’m guessing a lot of people had iPhones for years without having a native swipe option so they just never bothered with it. I’m definitely in that category. Honestly I totally forgot it was even a thing until reading this post just now. After years of practice I’m crazy fast with two thumb typing, I can only imagine swipe would slow me down to the point of irritation.

The whole point of federation is that you don’t have to pick just one place. You can add communities from nsfw instances, communities from nerd tv instances, communities from your geographic locality, etc…

No. I’ve got a bunch of friends who are just as techy and nerdy as I am, and they won’t move. “Yeah, Reddit sucks, but I’m not going to change.”

They didn’t go to Mastodon either, just Bluesky, which infuriates me, as it’s just another walled garden.