Chozo

No, and neither has anybody else. Not saying that to be rude or dismissive, but just using their own numbers on the front page to paint a picture. They have ~3,000 paying members as of right now. Patreon has over 10,000,000 paying members, and even then only a tiny, tiny fraction of their creators are actually sustainable.

Paid subscription services like this are a great idea, in theory; I’d love to get away from ad-supported platforms. But the truth is that they just don’t work for all but a few lucky people.

If you want monetization and scalability, you’re gonna have to get ads. Ad-free subscription services that actually benefit the creators are exceedingly rare. Very few people (less than 0.1%) are “making it” on Patreon and the like. The bitter truth is that most users can’t afford to financially support their favorite creators, and damn near zero creators could get the level of exposure needed to be sustainable without an ad-based platform backing them.

Video hosting is expensive af. Ultimately, small-time content creation is completely dependent on corporate benefactors. This is why every video platform that’s tried to compete against YouTube has failed. Nebula is trying, but that’s only useful to creators who fit within its specific niche.

I’m not saying this as a vote of support for the current system. Just an observation of how the market has played out so far.

I’ve recently gotten into the drift/phonk genre (as well as some adjacent genres), and have enjoyed the way that most of the prominent artists in the genre all collab with each other, and shine light on newer artists entering the scene. None of them seem to be taking themselves too seriously, either, so there’s a very fun energy to the scene. It’s still a fairly new genre, so there’s a lot of experimentation going on. It reminds me a lot of the early days of dubstep, with new sounds and a similar high-energy feel to the music. It’s also got some pretty varied influences, from eastern European electronic tropes to Latin American and reggaeton inspirations.

The artist I’ve been listening to the most lately has been Deathpixie, a virtual artist (like Gorillaz or Dethklok) who just recently signed with Mau5trap, which is probably the most “mainstream” move I’ve seen in the genre so far. But I’ve also been jamming the likes of Pinkii, Pro6lema, ProdGX, Kordhell, RoboPup, Raizhell, Demxn, etc.

At that point, if such content is already posted there and available for download, it doesn’t matter if it is only allowed to be downloaded via clearnet or VPNs as well. Blocking VPNs doesn’t make any difference here.

My understanding is that it’s for tracking/reporting purposes, and to mitigate future offenses by banning those IPs. You can report an IP to an ISP for CSAM violations, but it’s not as useful when the user’s on a VPN.

I’ve seen a debate regarding lemmynsfw with some people asking to turn off caching/proxying for images. I don’t know what’s their current status on this, but on my instance even thumbnails were not visible for catbox images. I’m not sure if it’s disabled or it’s the instance server itself having trouble accessing catbox.

Yeah, I’ve also noticed that Catbox links don’t seem to generate previews on Mbin, as well, so I suspect that may be a Catbox block of some sort. That’s interesting… I wonder if that causes a Lemmy instance to attempt a live preview instead of giving you a cached one. If so, that seems like something that probably shouldn’t be in place, IMO.

This would be somewhat believable excuse if they only blocked uploading/posting under VPNs.

With CSAM, you want to block uploading and downloading, because both are problematic for a host.

In this scenario catbox images posted to Lemmy for example, they don’t only reveal your IP the moment they are loaded when you scroll your feed

I’m 99% sure it doesn’t work that way. The Lemmy instance caches a preview image for posted links. But scrolling past without clicking a link will not expose your IP to Catbox unless you have an auto-preview setting enabled that opens/caches every link you scroll past automatically, which I don’t believe is enabled by default.

Well, I’m gonna have to brush up on my Metroid lore.

I’ll be honest, I don’t mind a free file host banning VPNs. Yes, VPNs have tons of legitimate uses, but they also have illegitimate uses that (what I understand to be) a one-man team is likely not prepared to deal with. They already have to deal with CSAM getting uploaded as it is.

I think they need money first, before increased traffic.

They only tell you about that nasty 4 hour side effect. There’s another one too - it can make you last a lot longer. Like I can’t stress this enough. Sounds cool, until your partner finished half an hour ago and you just don’t have the energy to keep at it. Good news is that the exhaustion and frustration usually prevents that 4 hour side effect 2-3 hours in advance.

SSRIs can have a similar effect. Like, thanks medicine, just one more thing to make me depressed.

Vance wouldn’t waste a second to take the oath of office.

Vance would be standing right by Trump’s side in his hospital room… pillow in hand…

LAPD, more like LARP.

Nah, Kiosks are legit. The kiosk doesn’t roll its eyes when you ask for a customization.

I hope her death is slow, agonizing, and humiliating.

Although, this is a distinction without a difference—it’s still AI of a sort being used to modify videos.

It’s actually a big difference. “AI” is an almost meaningless term without specifying what type of AI it is. ChatGPT is an AI, Sora is an AI, the “magic eraser” in your photos app is an AI, the AOL chatbot “SmarterChild” was also AI. “AI” can mean almost anything even remotely adjacent to “machine learning” right now. Just calling a tool “AI” says literally nothing about what the tool is or what it does. This sort of reductive, dismissive attitude toward anything an author doesn’t understand in tech articles is getting really worrying lately.

The internet has ruined me, because I don’t think I had the same interpretation as everyone else.

Ask your vet what they think about a vegan diet for your pets. They will tell you “no”. That should really be the end to the discussion, but I guess these guys think they know better than actual experts.