Alternative way to think about it: 10% of people are insufferable assholes. Do you want them to be happy with what you say?

Might be a bit on the Zoomery side of cultural conversation compared to the rest of this thread, but the duo Her’s were tragically killed in a road accident while on tour in the US. They made songs that were cheesy but still emotionally resonant, which is a hard balance to hit.

Their music would blow up even more online in the years following their death, I know there was a lot of of TikTok buzz around them during the pandemic, when a bunch of bedroom pop artists were gaining a ton of traction. While I hate that platform, it can be pretty good for promoting music naturally when people aren’t gaming the system (which they’re doing all the time - fuck TikTok). I think some of their famous songs are still considered TikTok clichés, but I wouldn’t really know.

I didn’t even know they were dead until this year.

There’s always this conspiracy of labels preferring to promote artists who are dead because they can pocket more money from dead artists, and I think about that when one of their songs pop up.

That’s true, but now you have to remember which server is legit. One benefit of a centralized service is that you have centralized verification, which at one time was a point in Twitter’s favor.

I’m not very well versed in cryptography, but if I understand the certification system for websites, different sites apply to a certificate provider, of which there are multiple. Maybe something like this is possible for the Fediverse? Where a user or community or instance can be “verified” by one or more trusted verification “agencies” or whatever.

That’s an interesting angle that I completely failed to notice. I thought this whole experiment is for Facebook/Meta to get a headstart in a new tech space, like they’re been trying to do with VR and the whole crypto craze.

While I never assumed their intentions were pure with any of this, I clearly was not nearly as cynical as one has to be with these people.

Not an amateur producer at all, but a few years ago I was listening to a lot of YouTube mixes while working. Lofi stuff might be cookie cutter elevator music to you, but I loved some mixes over others. I got attached to some of them, and discovered a ton of artists that way. These were single, long videos with many tracks each.

My heart sank when I started finding some of them turn into broken links. I figured out YouTube-DL and got to archiving. I found some reuploads of playlists I liked such as the wonderful Morning Coffee by the amazing SoulSearchAndDestroy (the lead song, damn fine coffee by mtbrd, is one of my favorite lofi tracks ever). Other playlists have been lost to time.

Sometimes I skim through my archived playlists to find a song I can remember in my head, and sometimes I don’t find the song, and it’s possible that I will never find it again. Again, silly for this to happen with lofi of all things (one of the most dispassionate and almost disposable genres of music).

I still think YouTube is unmatched for music discovery. Yes, you’re clicking on songs for “bad” reasons such as the thumbnail or recognizing the curator’s channel, but it worked pretty damn well for me.

Minus the sus stuff that used to show up when anyone googled “Reddit”.

Seriously, how were we ever okay with one of the site’s flagship communities revolving around perving on children. I even remember thinking it wasn’t that bad because “hey I’m not the one using that subreddit” but wtf

Are there any plans at all for a traditional app? I understand that there is an appeal to keeping things completely free from any App Store shenanigans, a certain freedom that comes with web apps over native apps.