I always assume there is someone working to fix things

After being a member of SDF for over 2 years, I always assume there isn’t.

Have you asked the SDF community if there is anything you can do to contribute to better uptimes?

No, for three reasons:

• I paid for SDF. That’s more than I can say for most services I use that are orders of magnitude more reliable. In fairness, I paid once, expecting to pay every year, because I like to pay for what I use. But I never paid again because the service is utter shit. Sorry to be rude, but that’s just the plain reality.

• I tried to contact someone in the SDF shell chat thingy and it’s always been crickets. I’ve given up on that.

• What the hell can I do to “contribute to better uptimes” aside from running a server at home on behalf of SDF?

Putting out there that if you’re waiting for the next outage of a few days to move servers, […]

I’m not waiting. I’m currently evaluating Piefed with a view to moving my communities over there if it proves good and reliable. As for my personal account, I already have this one on Sopuli as a backup (now my main account) and I’ve created another one in piefed.social and imported my settings there too.

I’m done with SDF. The next - and last - time I post from my SDF account is to lock my communities and redirect subscribers to their new home.

Let’s hope it lasts this time.

Next time it goes down, I’ll move my communities and my user account out to Sopuli permanently.

I owe my entire life to piracy.

I learned all I know on pirated software, and all the jobs that I’ve ever held are entirely attributable to it.

Did I shaft the software vendors I pirated the software of? Absolutely. But! I’m also very well paid and I pay a lot of taxes thanks to my ill-gotten skills. So overall, I contributed to society as a whole orders of magnitude more than I stole from the individual software vendors.

Of course, I recognize that this sort of logic is self-serving and leaves the software vendors I shafted without any money. But… just sayin’. There’s more than one face to this coin.

As for media - music, movies and such, I’ve almost never purchased any. I bought a few LPs as a kid before my parents bought me a cassette player (and more importantly, recorder). After that, I never ever paid a single dime for any media I’ve ever consumed. Never. And I still don’t.

I make no apology for this: it’s theft pure and simple. The only weak justification I can offer is that if I tried to purchase music or movies, it would be inconvenient to procure, DRM’ed, force shit I don’t want to watch down my throat, like those stupid unskippable FBI warnings on DVDs, and the pirated versions of mp3s and movies are much more user-friendly and resistant to time and deprecation. But at the end of the day, I fully admit that I’m a shameless freeloader.

The only thing I pay for religiously is books. No particular reason why I respect writers more than musicians or film directors… It’s just like that. I want writers to get paid.

That’s the exact kind of messy migration I want to avoid.

Agreed. I wish I could transfer my SDF communities over here but it’s not possible, sadly.

Whatever they once were, they suck now.

Whatever it is, as a SDF member, I curse the day I decided to support them. I paid SDF because I believe in paying for what I use, and it turns out to be the worst service I use by a long shot. Why I didn’t open my first Lemmy account on a more reliable instance for free, I’ll never know…