I self-host everything and subscribe to nothing.
If my router/server/Nas is powered on anyway, it might as well do the lot.
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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You still have internet subscription, right? Next: run your own ISP
Parent just needs some fiber, cables, a ditch witch, and a blow torch to get into the nearest backbone.
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At the moment none, I don’t find any of it worth the money. I’m more of; that’s a good thing to pirate.
Many companies who sell content legally deliberately mislead. You must beware of it. There is ample free libre content to use, music, games, books, etc. Legally free.
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Philosophical monthly support:
- Grapheneos
- Eff
- Tor
- Briar
- Molly
YouTube Premium
Unless you're doing it for YouTube Music, this seems absurd to me. On desktop traditional ad blockers work perfectly, and on mobile there's Revanced or Grayjay.
Anyway, I pay for Nebula.
Nebula
Do you like it? There's only like 10 creators I watch on YouTube who are there, and I'm not sure if I'll be able to find replacements. If I pay for Nebula, I'd rather ditch YouTube entirely.
And yeah, I use Grayjay and I'm about ready to buy it. I love the new Twitch integration, and some are on Odyssey, so that's cool. The app seems to use a lot more resources than NewPipe, and it's missing a few NewPipe features I really like (seeing playlists is the biggest one), but overall it's pretty good. If it was FOSS I'd buy it today, I'm just hesitating because there's just too many tradeoffs.
I'm a big fan of Nebula, though the calculus is a bit different because there a re probably upwards of 20 creators that I already watched from YouTube on there (even higher if you count the channels rather than the creators), plus a few more that I rediscovered, plus a fair few that I discovered for the first time on Nebula.
The biggest draw is probably the Nebula exclusives. Lindsay Ellis has put out 6 excellent videos since she withdrew from YouTube for good. Many other creators do bonus content for their regular videos, as well as a growing library of exclusive standalone productions. If you tell me which of their creators interest you, I could check and let you know how much bonus content you'd get from them.
But honestly, for me, the best thing is that it's sort of like a Super-Patreon. Sure, I could sign up to all of those creators' Patreons, and that would support them the most, but then I'd be paying well over $100 per month. Instead, with Nebula's annual plan, it's just $30 per year, and still supports them significantly more than a YouTube view, even one on Premium (which is itself significantly better than an ad view).
Honestly, I don't care about bonus content, I just want the content I have on YouTube elsewhere without ads and tracking, and I'm happy to pay for it.
The only ones I'm interested in are:
- Not Just Bikes
- Half as Interesting
I looked through the rest, and I honestly haven't heard of any of them. I don't watch a ton of YouTube, but I do follow a few channels. Here are some of my favorites, by category:
Tech news:
- Level1Techs
- Louis Rossmann - on Odysee
- Gamer's Nexus
- Optimum Tech
- Digital Foundry
- The Phawx
Privacy/advocacy:
- Audit the Audit
- Mental Outlaw
- NBTV - Naomi Brockwell
Math/science:
- Stand Up Maths
- Psyshow
- Steve Mould
- Tech Ingredients
Other news (balances liberal bias here on lemmy):
- Reason TV - could replace with podcast; still love Remy vids though
- John Stossel
Misc entertainment:
- Mr. Puzzle
- Lockpickinglawyer
- Jerry Rig Everything
If I had one or two solid channels from each category, I could abandon YouTube. But I don't know any of the channels there, and I'm not super excited about looking through a bunch of new channels again, it took years to filter through the trash on YouTube...
So Jason just puts out his videos about 4 days early on Nebula. He's done a small number of Nebula bonus content videos, but not very many. If you like his videos, you might also like CityNerd, Stewart Hicks, City Beautiful, RMTransit, and Hoog which all also cover urbanism.
The HAI crew also operate the Wendover YouTube channel, and under that brand have released a bunch of really good documentaries, including the incredibly moving "Final Years of Majuro". There's also the channel "Extremities" from them, which "brings you the stories of how and why the world's most remote settlements exist". They have their game show, Jet Lag, which is really good, but I think that's on YouTube on a delay; they've recently also announced an upcoming series called "The Getaway", but other than the name and being from that crew, no more is known about it. Completely unrelated to them, there's the channel "neo", which I find satisfies much the same itch as HAI.
For tech news, there's The Friday Checkout, OzTalksHW, and TechAltar, but I watch none of those so can't comment precisely on their content.
No explicit privacy advocacy I'm afraid.
For science, there's Minute Physics, The Science Asylum, and Real Science which are their ones most similar to the ones you listed, but there are also a whole heap that do science from a different angle, like Atlas Pro, which uses real paper atlases as a framing device for talking about world geography; Tibees, who talks through scientific papers; Tier Zoo, who teaches about animals through the lens of video game logic; and Simon Clark, who is primarily focused on climate change through the lens of what science and technology we can use to help prevent it. I still watch and love Stand Up Maths and Steve Mould on YT though.
Not sure I'd ever say Lemmy has a "liberal" bias. More explicitly anti-liberal, tbh. But still, Nebula has TLDR, who do an impeccable job of producing a BBC or ABC-style news show with an explicit goal of leaving their own personal biases at the door and creating a show that avoids bias as much as humanly possible. Their semi-regular "The Editorial" is excellent, with them going over the mistakes they made and issuing corrections. There's also J.J. McCullough, who I don't watch, but have been lead to believe is a right-wing (but not far-right—more the sort of traditional conservative you might have typically expected before the 2000s) creator who seems to cover things in current affairs. And just recently they've added a new channel called Morning Brew, which I'm still trying to get a read on, but seems to be news primarily with a business focus. They've also recently announced a new news division, but we don't know exactly what form that's going to take yet or what sort of content will be coming out of it.
As far a misc entertainment, it's a very personal thing that's hard to give recommendations for. NileRed is listed under the science category, but his videos are often so bizarre that I'd say they're more like light entertainment. There is a huge amount of stuff covering media criticism, some with very serious tones, some much more casual; some looking at the art through specific lenses (there are a couple of queer creators in particular), others who take more of a film production bent, and ones who view it through the lens of pop culture. The film and media categories are probably the strongest part of Nebula. There's edutainment like Extra History. I have never had an interest in professional tennis, but have found CULT TENNIS to be a shockingly interesting channel (one of the ones I discovered through Nebula). A whole bunch of music channels like 12tone, Mary Spender, and Polyphonic; personally, I find them all far too focused on modern music for my tastes as a classical fan. Also technically listed under the "music" category is Tantacrul, though really I'd say many of his videos should be must-watch for anyone doing any sort of software UX design, even though he's specifically focussing on music notation/composition software. LegalEagle is weirdly categorised under "news", which I guess makes sense because a lot of his videos do cover current events, but fundamentally I personally view him as an entertainment channel who talks about the law. If you're a gamer at all, Razbuten is excellent, especially his "...For Someone Who Doesn't Really Play Games" series, where he introduces his wife, who is a non-gamer, to various different genres of games.
Personally, I couldn't ever replace YouTube entirely with Nebula. There's just way too much stuff on YT, and their discovery algorithm has gotten so good. They're really good in some niches, and much weaker in others. Some of the niches they're weak in, they're pretty obviously never going to enter. Live-streaming gaming, for example. But others they're expanding into all the time. When I first joined, they didn't have a single urbanism channel, and now they have most of the big urbanists on YouTube. These days Nebula is big enough that I have to check a couple of times per day to be sure that, if I look at the "latest videos" section of the front page, I don't miss anything entirely. (Though there's always the dedicated latest videos page if I did miss something from the front page.) Latest Videos has been a great way that I've come across entirely new channels and even niches that I wouldn't have thought to be interested in before. It's big, and varied, and growing a lot. I think it'd be hard not for someone to get their money's worth from it.
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Oh, another thing just occurred to me. There are also Nebula-exclusive podcasts. I listen to The Urbanist Agenda, hosted by Jason Slaughter, with regular guests including (but not limited to) the other urbanists on Nebula.
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- Proton
- Bitwarden
- VPN
- Spotify
All I need as a student. I have a few open source projects that I aim to support monthly, as soon as I get my first paycheck after I'm finished with my degree, might count those as subscriptions then.
I really hope ur using chatgpt via api and not their own frontend api is far cheaper and there is a multitude of clients u can use
The one advantage of their front-end is that it's enabled for live internet search. But yeah it's not worth the price difference. I'm hardly getting $2 a month vs. the 20 they charge for the front-end.
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Mullvad, Bitwarden, Tuta, Signal.
...none. I donate to foss projects monthly though so it's a subscription in spirit but it's not really classified as a subscription
Can you list a few of them?
Off the top of my head: Lemmy, Lemmee, Signal, Molly, and Jellyfin
Literally nothing. All self hosted if I need it. Fuck subscription fees
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Everyone's mum's only fans for online gaming
Kagi, Sider, YouTube Premium.
I've been hearing good things about Kagi.
Google search got so bad I use DDG by default now, but that seems to be Bing by another name and itself seems to be deteriorating.
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Subscribe to?
None.
That is out of priciple to me, I refuse to have automatically renews subscriptions on my card.
I will however buy gift cards for services and buy new as I need them.
For that, I have one.
Geoguessr.
That game has helped me a shitload when I have been depressed, and now that I can afford it I buy gift cards for the time when I can't in the future.
- Nebula, to support YT creators while spiting YT
- A Domain name provider for my web domain
That's it. I don't quite avoid subscriptions like the plague anymore, but I still almost never pay for them.
Spotify? Does that count? Literally the only thing I subscribe to for money.
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- Bitwarden
- Racknerd VPS
- Backblaze B2
- PIA VPN
- Purelymail
- Usenet
- ChatGPT API
And the occasional donation to open source projects like pihole.
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Not really productivity services, but to name a couple,
- Google One (extra storage, bonus YouTube Premium & YT Music premium)
- MXroute for mail hosting (used to self host)
- Amazon Prime (for the shipping, the content is a bonus for us)
- Hulu (kid's gotta see that ONE show... 🙄)
- Lemmy.world (via Patron)
- Couple of YouTube creators and app publishers I enjoy regularly (via Patreon)
I'm considering joining Nebula because many of the creators I frequently watch on YouTube are setting up shop up over there, and I'm getting irritated with YouTube for how The Algorithm is affecting the quality and content of the infotainment channels I enjoy.
The phone app has it's problems at times, things like resetting to the main page, and other little nuisances, but I really like Nebula, went so far as to pay for their lifetime deal.
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- ChatGPT (API only)
- Adobe Creative Suite
- Astrill VPN
- sync.com (cloud storage with better encryption and lower prices than dropbox)
- a small VPS (gullo.me for $5 a year)
- webhosting package (all-inkl.com, 7.95€/month)
Think that's it for the time being.
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Bitwarden because it's super convenient, as well as Youtube Premium because I watch a ton of youtube. I also leech off my family's spotify premium subscription, so I don't pay for that personally but it is a subscription service I use. On top of that, I pay for a debrid service for pirating media since I'm sick and tired of the streaming service economy, which has been an excellent investment. And lastly I do pay for XBox Game Pass, though once I beat persona 3 reload I'm probably cancelling that.
Once I find work I'll probably subscribe to proton because I'd like to move a bit more away from google, but I'm not really in a rush to do that given my use of youtube premium and such. Kind of a longer term goal.
None.
ProtonMail, with my own domain, so that I have full control over my online identity and Spotify. As a developer I don't need anything else, I can work just fine with freely available stuff.
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Just a VPN. Thinking about trying out Proton's suite and maybe pay for that if it's worth it. Otherwise I'm more and more leaning on OSS and self hosted things these days because corporations have shown themselves not to be trusted with anything important.
From what I've heard self hosting your email though can be a big PITA so paying someone for email is not a terrible choice. Self hosting you need to carefully manage the system and reputation to make sure your email that you send actually gets delivered, and doesn't arrive in spam.
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Spotify, Netflix, Fastmail, a VPN (Pure I think at the moment), I think that's about it.
-Chatgpt -Mulivad VPN -Two twitch subs (one so I can feed ducks once a day, the other for a wholesome dude) -Two domain names
Mullvad, ProtonDrive, and my mobile data plan if that counts.
I stopped subscribing to Google drive, but truthfully I miss Google photos a lot because of how good it is, privacy aside.
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I used to, but I don't these days because the prices kept going up while the value kept going down. My last subscription was Pandora and Paramount+, but I wasn't using it enough to justify the continued cost.
I also hate ads on a paid service, that shouldn't be a thing. If there are ads, it should be free like Pluto.tv, Tubi, YouTube, Vimeo, etc.
I contribute $5 a month to Metafilter, and I use a paid VPN.
- Firefox Relay ($1/month)
- Bitwarden ($22/year, premium + family org)
- Inoreader ($15/year, Supporter to be ad-free)
- Joplin (donating 2$/month to the dev)
- Spotify (Family plan)
- Netflix (2 screens, HD)
- Amazon Prime (for faster free shipping and Prime Video)
- Amazon Kids+ (for the kids Fire HD tablets, they can play almost anything they want)
- IFTTT Pro+ ($4/month, legacy plan)
- NextDNS ($28/year) for the convenience of a pihole-like setup without having to host it
- Google One 2TB for the extra features and storage for my wife's business at home.
- Cheap-ass VPS on Atlantic.net ($1/month, legacy plan)
- 2 domain names, around $25/year for both on NameCheap
- YouTube Premium
- Apple One Family (Music, TV+, iCloud, Arcade)
- HBO Max (best value for high quality content but Apple is very close these days)
- Prime (barely use it but it's $12/yr here)
- Game Pass Ultimate
- Usenet Farm, couple of odd blocks and indexers
- Carrot Weather
Considering paying for RSS provider but they all seem overpriced for what they do above Feedly free tier.
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