I am American and I am not offended by this. I’m not even sure I disagree

Not even just changed, they removed basic functionality. For example - you cannot put the task bar to the side of your screen any longer. Never mind the fact that monitors are widescreen and having it on the side gives you more screen real estate. Never mind the fact that damn near every application has interaction at the bottom of the screen and it’s handy to be able to work freely without accidentally clicking something you didn’t mean to. Never mind that it’s been an option since windows 98. They just got rid of it. Only the bottom from now on.

This will not directly answer your question but while perusing at work I came across darebee.com , which is a fitness website run like Wikipedia. There are no ads whatsoever. There’s a video library showing how to do tons of exercises. Workout programs can be filtered based on your equipment availability and ability level, and everything is available in a PDF download absolutely free.

Really cool site, give it a look.

Even for a teaser, that was some hot diarrhea.

Your first download should be a guide on punctuation my brother.

If not Threads, how do we turn this FOSS venture free of corporate interference into a new avenue for a mega corporation to harvest all of our data for profit?

If not Threads, how will we ever ruin this place by turning it into Reddit?

If not Threads, who will I shill for?

Picking a better instance for your main is most advisable. Users can accept that the primary benefit of a free and open source federated service can also sometimes inconvenience them, or they cannot. Complaining about the core mechanic of the technology that literally cannot change is silly IMO. Corporate owned centralization leads to enshittification. Your account age indicates that you know that first hand.

Reddit syndrome still affects a lot of users here, who view having multiple accounts on different answers as an inconvenience instead of a feature of the platform design. The irony is that tons of users on Reddit had lots of accounts without batting an eye, but that extra step of having to lick a new instance is just SO complicated.

My wife went with her dad to see Oppenheimer last summer. She texted me 25 minutes in that the previews had just ended.

Fuck everything about that.

Okay yes that’s what I remember reading. I have Express VPN now, and while researching found it’s still surprisingly highly and doesn’t log. it’s on the more expensive side though, so I may still give proton or one of the other recs a try.

Same, I used to use PIA for about a decade, but I could’ve sworn I heard they were one of the ones that had gone way downhill. Otherwise I never had an issue with them. I’ll have to do some digging, see if it was founded or just a reddit rumor.

Oh nice thanks for that. So should I not worry as much about seeding the private trackers?

Yo! What exactly is different about private trackers? Like how does that help? Im lucky enough to have one but due to the seed ratio rules, I find myself downloading from my usual sites more frequently because I worry about seeding indefinitely.

Yo! What’s a proper VPN these days? It seems like all the ones I used to trust went to shit.

Seems weird to me in a day and age where switching apps is literally just a swipe of a finger. People will jump from Instagram to tik tok to texting to emailing to Whatsapp without thinking about it at all, but a podcast app is a hurdle they don’t want to deal with. Even more bizarre because until very recently it was always like that, for the entire history of podcasts. It’s a shame too because podcast apps are so intuitive these days. Listening to podcasts on Spotify feels clunky by comparison.

To each their own I guess, but I personally just don’t understand it.

Makes a lot more sense. I don’t listen to very many but when I do I use an app that isn’t Spotify. I don’t mind fast forwarding the commercials in the app. I have no desire to have Spotify try and algorithm my podcast tastes, especially not on top of injecting extra ads into them

Genuine question - why does anyone listen to podcasts on Spotify? There have been and still are a TON of quality podcast apps that are 100% free and don’t do this bullshit. Like, I’m aware Spotify has podcasts but in my mind Spotify is music, podcast app is podcasts. It was that way for more than a decade. I just don’t get it TBH.

Yeah, unfortunately could just be (probably is) good ol’ enshittification then. In this case at least.

No, this was not a baked in ad by the podcast hoster but literally inserted by Spotify.

Just FYI, those two things don’t need to be exclusive. In this case Spotify is probably the one sponsoring the podcast, and so they inserted ads themselves, as opposed to the content creators including their sponsor ads. Many more successful podcasts are doing this now, and it seems like the ads get shoved in when there sometimes aren’t even breaks.

Not saying it doesn’t suck, it absolutely does. Just pointing out that it’s a new trend. So it’ll probably get worse!

Seems to be invite only at the moment according to their sign up page. Any way for you to send an invite?