Quick PSA: they don’t currently block VPNs, so you can sign up for an account in a cheap country (I picked Nigeria) and use a foreign currency debit card (I use Revolut) to get Premium for like £1.50 a month for my entire family.

If they close that loophole then I think I’ll be done with it, the ads make it basically unusable these days.

Hard disagree with that, DDG searches are accurate about 90% of the time that I use it (which as a web dev is quite a lot) if they aren’t hitting Google with the same term rarely wields any better results.

Apple Maps and Fastmail.

Fastmail is paid but the 1Password and disposable email address system makes it worth it for me.

I went through a period of de-googling a couple of years ago. Swapping browser, mobile os, search engine, storage, maps, music, video purchases, voice assistant and even email service was relatively simple, there are alternatives out there which do the job just as well if not better than what Google offer.

The only exception is YouTube, yea there are individual sites that occasionally offer some of the videos I want (often with a subscription attached), there are some federated systems like NewPipe which have some videos but there is no one offering remotely the quantity or quality of what you can get on YouTube for free.

As the article states, it’s basically a monopoly at this point without a viable alternative.

Arc is weird but pretty good once you get used to it.

DuckDuckGo is good if you want a minimal browser and don’t really care about extensions

Brave is OK if you want a slightly more private version of Chrome

Honestly though, just use Firefox.

They totally did that

The problem was that people weren’t really interested in any of it.

The UI was cluttered and messy to look at, none of it was as polished or natural to use as iOS or Android.

Plus there was no Google Maps, no Google Docs (and Office 365 wasn’t around to replace it), even that apps that were in the store felt pretty bad quality. I had Spotify on my iPhone and it was nearly flawless, when I switched to Windows Phone it kept cutting out or crashing or disconnecting from the mobile connection, it just wasn’t fully baked.

I’ve seen a few video games and movies that I’ve gone on to look into from YouTube ads.

90% of them are total annoying bollocks though.

/r/webdev and /r/formulae are the main ones I miss.

This is how I do it.

I pay for Netflix, Prime (only really for the free shipping), Disney+, Apple TV+ and Spotify, if it’s not on any of these then I’m going to pirate it.

The whole exclusivity stuff is just rubbish, I get the reasoning but if you can’t make your content easily accessible then I just don’t want to pay for it.

YSK that YouTube Premium can be bought over a VPN for a whole lot less than the regular retail price, it’s a bit fiddly to set up but I’ve got a Nigerian based family account that costs me £1.76 a month.

the more traditional style of forums are still around too.

They’re very rare these days though. It’s a whole lot easier to keep all your interests in one place rather than heading off to one forum for gaming chat and another for programming chat and another for gardening chat.

Keeping it all in a single feed means your interest can be piqued at random times and you’ll be more likely to interact.

Both of these.

American Gods really pissed me off though if they had stuck to the books it could have been an amazing series with great characters and weird but fun storylines in a unique setting. But they added too much stuff and there was a total mess with the show runners leaving so it all sort of fell apart before one of the best plot lines of the whole story.

I kinda want to rewatch it again someday though…

I have friends who are big time LOTR fans who absolutely hate it and didn’t get past the first couple of episodes.

Me - who has no context around the whole thing - found it kinda entertaining :/

In the UK at least, switching banks is super easy, I’ve done in twice in the last 2 months because they offered free cash to do so, there is enough competition that the banks have to make it easy to move or else they lose customers.

For government, generally most systems are built to be as accessible as they can be because there has been [https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-public-sector-websites-and-apps ](whole raft of legislation) written up to cover this.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t be a problem (power companies etc could prove to be sticky) but there are legal requirements that entities above a certain site have to meet.

If you want to move them elsewhere(or even just get a csv export of them) there are apps for that.

https://freeyourmusic.com will let you pay a one time fee to do it to as many services as you want, it’s a bit slow but it’ll get there eventually.

I think I got my .fun for about £2 from names.co.uk usually price for a .com is £30.

I’ve found most weird TLDs are cheaper than classic ones, but there are some exceptions (.app and .io comes to mind)

The best time to leave Twitter was when Elon took over, the second best time is right now.

I think would be a step too far for most

Honestly Apple TV+ is a pretty good service; Silo, Severance, Physical, Shrinking, Mythic Quest, For All Mankind and Invasion are all worth a watch, and that’s just the stuff I’ve seen.

I would recommend at least taking a trial for a month, there is less stuff but it’s a lot higher quality than much of the junk on Netflix.

Foundation on Apple TV+, beautiful, complicated, epic sci-fi. I’m rewatching the first season whilst the second is getting released week by week.

I wish I could wipe my memory of Severance and watch it again for the first time again.

Such an incredible show.