Thanks! I went and followed the discussion link the other guy posted. I saw one concern — the handling of voting. But someone/some people are going behind a lot of those comments and saying they fixed it based on user feedback. So that’s good. I also feel I understand the two (Lemmy and Piefed) and their relationship a bit more.

If it sounds like I’m a bit eager to learn, it’s because I like to help others, but to do that I have to understand things first.

So let me see if I understand you correctly. The “one I’m on now” you refer to in the third paragraph, meaning dbzer0, is an instance of Lemmy (along with others) that are federated (loosely united) together in the same feed.

You’re on piefed.social, so you’re federated with dbzer0 and the other Lemmy feeds. So it’s not like you’re on a whole other federated social network like Bluesky (which is more like Twitter whereas Lemmy is more like Reddit). But it has different programming, so you can access more/different features from your end than I can on mine, but we still have access to the same communities?

Still kinda struggling to understand how fediverse stuff works.

Thank you! Subscribed to both and found a few things to sub to in the second one.

Thank you! I’m mostly treating it like “Reddit but for left leaning people” and enjoying learning the differences.

Here’s what’s wild though. At first with music streaming it was largely just American, Western, popular music. I left Spotify for Apple Music because the latter had Japanese music and I was tired of sideloading it into Spotify. Now Spotify has Japanese music too.

The Japanese music market is super weird. Anime is to Japanese music in the 2010s and 2020s what MTV was to western music in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It’s the international hit maker. So anime is bringing western eyes to all this music, not you go in YouTube and a lot of them have “YouTube edition” videos that are like half the video. Because they don’t fully trust us I guess? Sometimes the video is on Apple Music though.

I know Japanese music is more expensive than ours. I mean like the cost of a CD. So when bands would release a Japanese album, they’d add bonus tracks to help increase the value. Western bands do it too. Look up an album you know on Wikipedia and see if there’s a Japanese version with some bonus tracks.

I’m wondering how Apple Music and later Spotify more or less tamed the Japanese music market but TV and movies are so much harder.

I’m doing my part! Just joined a couple days ago. Thought I could stick with Reddit but it got too far to the right for me. They crossed a line I can’t ignore, but I like the format, so I’m here. I knew Reddit was going to be winding down soon so I didn’t put as much effort in. I’d like to start a couple communities here, whereas I wouldn’t have tried over there. I just hope the toxic people who run the communities there don’t see what I’m doing and try to invade. I mean we could use the numbers but not the toxicity — though I feel that that comes with any influx of new users.

Absolutely. But to clarify, Apple Music pays more per stream than Spotify and others. Spotify trends to cut bigger checks to popular musicians because they have more subscribers.

Also — someone feel free to fact check this — I’ve heard that if, say, you put an album out on BandCamp but not streaming, and I buy it and sideload it into both services, and you later add it to both services, Spotify won’t pay you for my streams because I’m streaming the sideloaded copy whereas Apple will match it. I keep the metadata if it’s different but you’d get paid for the streams because it matches it.

Wouldn’t “GPT it” be easier/more likely to say?

I generally don’t use these, but Copilot (in Windows) uses one of them (I’m not sure which) and I’ve thrown a few questions at it when I’m bored. Nothing that matters. We have Windows 11 machines at work. I find AI amusing but I don’t take it seriously, and I don’t use it at home or on my mobile. It’s really not for me.

I don’t like Grok but they have a good name. I mean I don’t “like” any of them, but I like that one less because of its… the stuff it’s said. Mostly because of who’s been training it. But “Grok it” sounds better than Chat/GPT it and sounds almost as good as “Google it.”

There’s an easy solution to this. I pay for Apple Music because I get access to pretty much all the music I want. I can sideload what they don’t have, which isn’t much. They have better audio quality, and aren’t stiffing artists to pay some right wing nutjob science denier like the other streaming platform of note. I pay because I love music and want to support what I love. Why isn’t there a similar service for TV and movies? That’s the solution. Let us pay for what we love and make it easy. Apple figured it out with music. Valve figured it out with games.

I think they don’t want to solve the problem. I think they want to solve a different problem. I think they’re making this a problem so they can push legislation to protect their profits.

Disco Elysium is the kind of game I’d love to sit down with the developers/producers and try to play it, and ask them questions about it.

I own it on Steam, but I can’t remember if I bought it because it was on Mac, or if I bought it before I switched. Either way, I’ve tried to start it a few times and I just don’t get anywhere. It’s the kind of game I should like, but I don’t have the patience to learn it.