Those aren’t available to register anymore though, are they?

I don’t use any service that requires a phone number, which even does that anymore? I guess Facebook, Instagram, Twitter? That’s surely just to track you. It is very easy to spoof a mobile number, the regular old confirm security code per email works just as well. Or just do email register + 2fa with an authenticator app or passkey.

There are better ways to confirm someone is a human. If they would not just want to gather personal user data instead, which apparently is the case.

Why the fuck do they require my phone number to register? No thanks.

Navidrome is neat

It’s not more risky than torrenting yourself, it is just not risk free. If you live in a country where torrenting is safe: great for you! It’s not like that everywhere.

Regarding the entire issue: Usenet and Debrid are extremely uncommon and “underground” compared to regular torrents or direct downloads. The lobby does not have infinite resources so they target the big and easy to catch fish. Just harvesting torrent IPs and suing individuals with zero knowledge of defending themselves is super easy.

I’m trying to get back into using RSS but have noticed that all sites - for example tech news like The Verge - publish a shit ton of content daily nowadays.

How do you use these apps?

I added a few feeds and now have 300+ news every day that I need to sort through and 95% of them do not interest me. That was what was so great with Artifact, it did the sorting and learned my interests.

Are there separate curated feeds (similar to Artifact) to subscribe to or is it possible to filter by interest (keywords) in the RSS apps, like Netnewswire?

I don’t have time or the nerve scrolling through feeds with dozens or hundreds of posts a day, it’s a pretty awful user experience.

Some sites seem to have separate feeds for different themes but that’s also not very flexible.

For once a good app for news and articles appears, and within a year it is killed off because of “limited market opportunity.”

Urgh. I just HATE the modern internet.

But thanks for the alternatives list. Maybe something will catch on. Feeeed looks really cool.

Creating a burner email would take a tenth of the time it took you writing this post.

Wow. If this isn’t a perfect example of the possible problems with federated networks I don’t know what is.

I’m still for it of course. But it has to be done right and this is far from that.

Thanks, I didn’t know that and never bothered to look. But then you still have the (SEO) issue of all the domains vs one in the case of Reddit or Quora or Stack Overflow. But yeah, a few very large Lemmy instances will probably start to rank well once they have enough good content.

Except each instance has its own URL meaning ranking for ANYTHING is extremely hard since each domain’s rank will always be weak in the sea of others. Each is even being penalised by the algorithm if there are duplicate content mirrored between different URLs. It’s the weakness of the fediverse if we are to follow how search engines have worked in the last decades. Maybe it will lead to new search engines (I hope so) but right now it is not going to work well to replace for example Reddit … or rank well in general at all.

It is the strength and the weakness of it all.

On Mastodon I did exactly this. A month later the small server closed and I had to start over from scratch.

I don’t have any issues with it. I use Ice Cubes, it’s awesome.