Start with the cheapest plan.

If you ever find yourself wishing steam installed a game faster, then upgrade to the next best one. See if that feels like enough.

I pay a bit more for 600mbps, but that’s because I have a home server which runs services for friends and family. It might be streaming media, be syncing nextcloud data, and uploading a snapshot to off-site backup, all at the same time, and it needs to do that without hiccups for anyone accessing it. Even then it’s more than strictly necessary. 350mbps would be VERY fast, and enough.

Along with that comes the ability to install small games basically instantly on my gaming desktop, and big ones in the time it takes me to grab a snack, but even the cheapest speed available would otherwise be more than enough for single-person use.

My siblings and mother live on 10mbps home wifi, and they never even complain.

Yes and no.

Pending means the sub hasn’t gone through to the home instance of the community. If you’re the first subscriber, this means the there will be no inbound federation bringing the content from that community to your instance.

If someone else on your instance has already successfully subbed, the federating is already occurring, and your instance will be receiving the activity as it comes in.

Your instance will then show it to you, both in your subscriptions and in general, even though the sub is pending.

If your sub stays pending, you may have to unsub and resub to get it to work. If no-one else on your instance has subbed either, then the activity will continue to not show up for as long as it is pending.

No. EAC and Battleye developed ways to explicitly support proton, which has to be explicitly enabled by the developer for the game to run.

Proton didn’t change, the popular AC options did. They’ve had proton support pretty much since the steamdeck launched, and it works great as long as the developer of a game bothers checking the checkbox for it.

EAC works on linux just fine, and the fact that Apex runs, means Respawn deliberately allows it.

I just checked the docs for installation instructions, it didn’t seem to make a distinction anymore.

Great. It wasn’t too long ago that MariaDb was still the “recommended” option.

Nextcloud.

Though I think it has some level of support for postgres by now. I should check on that.

How the fuck do you “accelerate” something they are already achieving?

Not sure how much of a future it can have even if you slap on some “speed”.

Satisfactory 1.0 just dropped.

Coffe Stain literally does straight up ASMR trailers sometimes.

I fully agree. Spotify’s payment model has been criticized for years, but they refuse to consider changing it.

AFAIK youtube music works in the way you suggest, where the money from your subscription gets divided up among whoever you listen to.

There are various methods.

Spotify does have a free tier.

But paid accounts can rack up so many plays they can pay for themselves. If you listened to ten tracks, but someone else listened to ten thousand, then your money barely paid for what you listened to, and almost all of it went towards whatever the other user listened to a bunch.

There has also been malware that hijacks legitimate accounts… There’s even been recommendation algorithm fuckery to manipulate the relevant tracks into getting recommended/autoplayed for a bunch of users.

Spotify didn’t lose a dime. Their cut is fixed.

What each play is worth is determined by how many plays there were in a month, and the income from subscribers that month.

If the “pot” is ten bucks, and people listen to a hundred songs, each artist gets ten cents for each play. If there were a thousand plays, each play is only worth one cent.

This guy didn’t make money by taking it from spotify, he made it by taking it from everyone else. Spotify actually has no reason to care, and playfarming scams have been happening for years.

They only get stopped when they get big enough for the giant music labels to notice.

You and me might buy our music on bandcamp, but the vast, vast, vast majority of people still just pay for spotify and never give how it works a second thought.

A moderetely successful indie artist is still likely to make way more having their albums on streaming services, than they are selling them on bandcamp.

you can’t really use technological complexity as an excuse to depend on fat middlemen.

Is that what I’m doing? At no point did I say streaming services could be fair and good if only this one issue was fixed. Merely that play farming works by skimming the money from real artists.

Now, I’d also like to ask “wtf”, since you are kinda suggesting that it is the artist’s that are at fault for not getting the money they need to live, by not using their own websites/bandcamp.

The “royalty payers” are the streaming subscribers, and they pay the same amount regardless of how much they listen to.

The different streaming services have different payment models, but Spotify at least works by first taking their cut from subscribtion income each month.

Then, the rest is evenly distributed to the plays that month.

By inflating the playcount with bots, this guy gets a bigger share, at the expense of everyone elses plays becoming worth less.

None of the services have some infinite money glitch where more plays just means more money out of nowhere. How much you get for each play is not a fixed amount, It’s always based on how much money actually came in from subscribers, so anyone using bots to tilt the scales, is stealing from everyone else.

TBF, this particular loophole doesn’t take any money from the streaming services. Quite the opposite, it massively inflates their stats.

And while it does siphon money from the big labels, it also impacts small indie artists just trying to earn enough from each play to get to eat.

Yeah, this guy is in trouble because he stepped on some big toes, but he curb-stomped a bunch of little guys, too.

Spotify is losing nothing. They take their cut either way.

The only people getting their money stolen are real artists. Their share of the income shrinks as these scammers inflate the number of plays that the money is shared between.

AFAIK YT Music does this. The money from your subscription gets divided amongst whatever you listened to.

That still wouldn’t address the stolen account problem, but yes, it’d be a huge improvement.

I have no idea why Spotify still sticks to this massively exploitable model, except for the fact that it MASSIVELY inflates their stats for investors and advertisers.

No.

By inflating his own playcounts, the value of each play goes down. All that money he got? Came straight out of the pockets of real artists.

No.

Music play-farming has been a thing for probably almost a decade by now.

Spotify divides the huge amount of money they get from subscribers each month, evenly among all the plays during that month.

Someone figured out ages ago, that since spotify has a free tier, that means that if you can get some tracks on spotify as an artist, you can then create an army of free-tier bot accounts and massively inflate the share of the money you get paid as an “artist”.

Of course, this comes at the cost of everyone elses legit plays becoming worth less. Its an absolutely disgusting scam and Spotify has been ignoring it happening for years.

Adding AI generation into the mix is barely an innovation.

Edit: And if you’re wondering how it works with services that don’t have a free tier, it is done by hijacking peoples real accounts, then having them stream the relevant tracks over and over. Either by stealing entire accounts, or infecting devices that are already logged in with malware that will open the relevant app/website and play the tracks over and over.

You’re not wrong.

The kind of art humanity creates is skewed a lot by the need for it to be marketable, and then sold in order to be worth doing.

But copyright is better than nothing, and this exemption would straight up be even worse than nothing.

The whole point of copyright in the first place, is to encourage creative expression, so we can have human culture and shit.

The idea of a “teensy” exception so that we can “advance” into a dark age of creative pointlessness and regurgitated slop, where humans doing the fun part has been made “unnecessary” by the unstoppable progress of “thinking” machines, would be hilarious, if it weren’t depressing as fuck.