Found this out when I wanted a decent journaling app for Android. All the most popular ones have subscription tiers that amount to hundreds of dollar over just a few years… for a fucking journal app? what the hell!
Not only that but they can train their AI’s on all their subscribers’ journal entries. Check F-Droid.org for some free, privacy respecting FLOSS journaling apps.
There is this one app on there called PTO (plain text organizer) that is pretty interesting. It basically just gives you a new plaintext file each day to journal on
“If buying isn’t owning, pirating isn’t stealing.”
I heard this before and it is becoming more true each day.
Next up, (cell) phone plans.
(though fuck landlines phones too)
That’s cool, I do not have a single subscription and will never, ever have one. If I can’t buy your product, I’ll sail the 7 seas
How do you get home internet service without a subscription? I’m down to try it.
I pirate everything, own everything and I’m happy as fuck. I even share my Jellyfin server with 20 other people so they can share in my joy.
we need some kind of “subscribers bill of rights” both to discourage and to check the stupid business models.
It won’t make any difference. There’s a gamers Bill of Rights that nobody remembers. It was produced by the owner of a company that now ignores that it ever existed.
I’m not sure what the logical outcome of this escalating arms race of enshittification will be, but as a career Sysadmin I’ve been able to avoid a LOT of this bullshit through self hosting, which is something a (Non-tech nerd) layman isn’t going to bother with, for as long as existing products (and their subscriptions) are still within “tolerable” levels.
But the thing is, a lot of the convenience with computing devices today didn’t exist in the 90’s, when it was more common for young normies to have what would be considered above average computer technical skills today.
When the entire market turns into inescapable subscriptions, the market for a non-technical friendly appliance box, like Synology came close to doing, shows up to corner the market on hardware you can own and run your own shit on with minimal headaches and no subscriptions.
To the extent you are able to (particularly if trying to stay legal).
So for streaming content, much of that isn’t available to ‘buy’ at all. Even for the stuff you can “buy”, technically speaking in many jurisdictions it’s not legal to be able to rip your DVD or Blu Rays or remove DRM from a digital download.
For certain software, on-premise editions have been abolished or priced into the stratosphere because they don’t want that market to exist anymore. Some of that software has competent alternatives, but sometimes your choice is dictated by your clients and partners, and opting for a less compatible or merely perceived as less compatible option is a non starter. Even among on-premise editions, a lot of software vendors have switched to still having it by subscription as the only legal way to keep using it. Again, maybe for those software you can get away by breaking the law as a workaround, but legally…
This is of course assuming the conversation narrowly applies to software type things. Everyone is also rebranding ‘leasing’ as ‘as a service’ and are copying much of the software playbook, for the same reasons, including making purchase of equipment more expensive to steer people toward the ‘as a service’ revenue strategy.
Then going beyond the ‘tech’ industry, it’s getting really hard to buy a house rather than rent it from some company that has been pouring money into acquiring all the available real estate.
the only things in life im happy owning is my home, my transportation and my informatics
