Sadly I couldn’t think of a better way yet. 😔

Though not due to piracy, I also end up with a lot of repeated, redundant and/or unwanted files, so I’m often having to delete them.

I see. That’s sad. But thanks for clarifying it!

Not ideal, but what I do is to load all musics onto VLC, open the list view (Ctrl L on Linux), let the list fully load, sort by song name and check what appears repeated or that I don’t want for other reasons. It also helps if the songs are metadata-rich, such as the ones bought from Bandcamp and ITunes (not Apple Music), so it’s easier to differentiate them (given this community, I have no clue how/where from yours are). And lastly, there’s a little plugin I found a while back that helps a bunch, vlc-delete, which adds the option to delete the currently playing file, and that, at least in the Linux version, benefits from motor memory since it can be executed with a quick succession of 2 Alt shortcuts.

The Reddit-inspired instances like the Mbin and Lemmy-based ones may be of interest for you. The Lemmy ones, from what I can tell, always hide the follower list, and the Mbin ones allow the user to choose between showing and not showing. Also, both seem to be able to connect to Twitter-like instances, though UI for that part in the Mbin ones is pretty barebones and the Lemmy ones mix them up.

I can conjecture some things, though I can’t be 100% sure on either:

First, maybe it’s fanatics/fanboys that don’t like competition making their platform less relevant. Second, it’s paid actors complaining. Third, it’s robot accounts making posts. Fourth, as proposed in the OP, people are getting the wrong impression due to noisy and problematic bubbles. Fifth, people being scared of leaving their comfort zone. Sixth, a mix of either some or all the previous possibilities.

For finding content creators on alternative services, maybe use Grayjay for Android? It aggregates multiple services into a single, mostly concise UI, and when you do a search, Grayjay can search all services at once. Also recently it added a recommended tab, which should help finding new channels on the go.

Not much preference on the work’s medium. Rather, to me, it’d be whichever as long as it’s concise and entertaining.

Whether it’s a rage-click community, a community made for an agenda, or both, I don’t know, but in either cases, I wouldn’t see as surprising for the mods in such a community to be very trigger-happy. Best you can do, I think, is to block communities and individuals with such a profile, and to recommend others to not engaging (remember to explain why if you do it, btw).

Mint seems decent all around. No cutting edges nor it’s specialized in any areas, but it’s a jack of all trades, and rather stable.

Ooooh, interesting! Thought it could’ve been one of DOS era’s pre-rendered games.

Is it from some game?

Blocking, yeah.

Putting the tone aside, I usually browse the All tab for that reason, and also because subscribing in Lemmy is weirder than it was on Kbin (even if it doesn’t crash the page like Kbin did). Nothing personal against the communities, and sure, it’s an exercise on patience, but after some time, the results become noticeable as my feed gets fine-tuned into what I want to see.

Been using NoPhoneSpam. While it won’t automatically block any numbers, it will cancel incoming calls not matching its filters. Only issue is that, some times, it takes a few seconds for it to recognize not passing calls, but I think it happens when the phone is under a higher load and the system starts lagging a bit, like when downloading bigger files and playing games.

Don’t know if I’d have one I’d call a favorite, but some I still hold dearly years after having completed them are Starbound, Ultimate Ninja 5, Dissidia 012, the first Devil May Cry, and Va-11 Hall-A.

Starbound due to its execution of sandboxing. Ultimate Ninja 5 and Dissidia 012 for how sharp their combats feel, despite being very fast-paced arena fighters without being musou or hack and slashes. DMC 1 for showing a genre of horror that didn’t require jumpscares to feel oppressive and tense (reminds me I should play Resident Evil at some point, since DMC was a recycled RE project). And Va-11 Hall-A for showing I may have had several biases towards certain game genres (hated visual novels back then), and got me to change my mentality to “first I’ll try a given game out, whichever it may be, then decide if I like it or not”.

If it’s a joke, totally missed the point, so sorry to teamevil if I sounded too coarse. "<.<

I do not have a newsletter nor I know what it has to do with the post.

Having disciplined myself to break such downward spiral cycles helped. That is, if I feel stagnant, I force myself to do something, anything else. Maybe it could help you too?

Also great for finding channels in alternative services, and even more so since Google breaks Youtube’s compatibility to 3rd party tools every once in a while.

Safest measure, from what I understand, is to completely replace the system for a vanilla one - that is, without any software from Google or related - and then install alternatives unrelated to the datahoarding companies.