I’m going to mention SLSKD if you’re at all into self hosting. I run that on a crap laptop at home, and can access it via wireguard/tailscale, then from my phone handle adding new downloads. This is borderline a required feature for me because I learn about a lot of music via word of mouth and being able to go grab it on the spot is great functionality.

Spotify’s payment model also adds a ton of bias to their suggestions. Artists need to hit a threshold number of listens a month to get paid at all, so Spotify ends up just suggesting music from artists they are already paying, rather than letting other folks hit that threshold. It’s also why the “shuffle” feature never actually shuffles a whole playlist before starting to repeat songs. If you really pay attention the songs that get repeated by the shuffle algorithm are the ones from bigger artists to try and keep smaller groups from getting paid at all.

Please let this be your sign to start ditching corporate platforms across the board. Enshitification will come for your pristine app experience eventually. Go spend your Spotify monthly bill on one album every month from bandcamp or something. Own your own media. Share it with friends. GET OFF CORPO AD PLATFORMS! I realize this is the fediverse, so people are already kind of on board, but I think music streaming is often given a pass, or sneaks by our focus when discussing these issues.

Came here to say the same thing.

Hello, it’s me, the subject of this portrait. Self proclaimed archivist that was proud when I reduced the number of tabs on my phone from the 500 max to 430. I’ll have you know sitting still for this portrait was one of the most challenging experiences in my life.

I used to use a browser extension to do this, mostly liked it until I tried to convert all my ebooks to it as well. It’s works, but it technically splits the words into two objects in order to change the font, which makes searching the book nearly impossible because typing a whole word will no longer find instances of it, instead you have to search for either half. Only an issue for ebooks, but it sort of turned me off of using this in general. Also I believe it’s “technically” copyrighted. I remember encountering something that wanted me to pay to use this. I found alternatives, but still, just left a bad taste in my mouth even though it helped. It did help me naturally read faster even without it, because rather than directly processing each letter I can do a sort of exclusion based search of my vocabulary as I process each letter. After 2 or 3, sometimes 4 letters, and with context I can correctly assume the rest of the word and move on.

Woah, I just got an ad for this today, and was intrigued enough to see what their monetization model was (in app purchases/subscriptions for “pro” features) and took a big pass on it.

And the police can do either and it’s called justice!

I also avoided it for some of these reasons, but in the end it was just the setup that got messy. I ended up using Sunshine/Moonlight for an overall nicer experience. I can use it to stream games if I’ve got a good connection, or toss it in low bandwidth mode for remote admin work. I run it behind Tailscale to access it from anywhere, it supports Wayland, it’s all fully open source, and I’m very happy with the setup.