I get all the sides of this dilemma and I think it comes down to personal choice. I got rid of most of mine and kept a handful. Then we had kids and I herited an old TV/vid combo so they were able to watch my wife’s old Disney movies she’d kept. For a few years there they enjoyed a brief renaissance, but as they got older and less keen the tapes just take up space.

We can access every thing we want online, and, while the VHS does have that nostalgia, my children aren’t that into the novelty of it anymore and would prefer to stream stuff instead.

In terms of ownership, I struggle with which physical formats to retain. Musically I’ve kept my vinyl, but we’ve got 100s of CDs that I can’t bring myself to toss out. I’ve got a load of Blu-ray which is cool, but never gets played.

Even all the media files in my NAS are rarely used. It seems like IPTV is king or us at the moment, and physical media is somewhat redundant. But hey, we’ve got a basement, so there’s always the option to store them out of site, which is a workable compromise for now.

:::

Same! Wild how they went from throwaway accounts being part of the culture to banning people forever and employing techniques beyond what Facebook does to control accounts.

Depends entirely on whether or not it has an incognito mode.

Sensible choice.

That might be the case. Or you could be part of something else. A collective consciousness, of which you are a transient node. Or maybe there is no time at all. What we call time could just be our current state on a progress bar as we process life. Or maybe we’re part of a nervous system for some larger construct. Or perhaps we are just reluctantly self-aware iterations of bio computers with fleeting lives that appeared through the chance combination of carbon-based structures.

Who knows. That’s the beauty of it, which I personally feel religion and a certain type of confident atheism tend to deny with their respective faith/certainty.

Even if we did, most of us will likely be born into slavery on some distant colony as the property of a deranged tech trillionaire.

I’m not into gaming. I think I’m the only adult male I know of comparable age that isn’t. I don’t really know why. I think it’s a mental block. I was big into 16-bit Atari/Amiga games in the early 90s. Then I just hit like 16/17 and got into music and drinking to fit in. The gaming scene at the time (pre-internet) was social kryptonite, and I lived in rural Scotland so I left it all behind.

Oddly, I returned to general computing in my early 20s as the internet was blowing up and now work in the IT sector.

But still not a gamer, which ironically is quite isolating.

Lemmy is like internet jail. We got sent here for breaking the rules on Reddit, but now we’re institutionalised and it feels safe, even if there are some very odd people here with us - they’re mostly nice and just serving their time…

I used to use the NME website, which was a weekly music paper in the UK, back in the day.

It had forums and free webmail, so I had had an nme.com address that made me feel kinda cool (I was a teenager and music was very much my identity).

Then they cancelled the webmail and that was that. All my teen emails gone forever. I’d love to get them back, and who knows,they could be sitting on a server somewhere, but I doubt it.

Oh, also Bebo. Posted a lot on that precursor to Facebook and now it’s all gone.

To be brutally honest, I have only the slightest inkling as to what it actually is - I was just looking for a Reddit alternative. I signed up, entered my credits into the Boost android app and here I am. It’s liked the Reddit experience I miss from years ago, except with less content but nicer people.

How to disagree with people politically but remain friends