I’d go one step further and say pirating music is too big of a hassle in general. Apple Music and Tidal do loseless compression, have huge catalogues and are so dirt cheap I don’t understand why you’d make your life so hard on purpose. Once effectively unlimited mobile data became a thing music piracy lost most of its purpose.

Why not browse your subscriptions through subscriptions section? I understand that it’s annoying that you can’t make it default on startup in the app but it’s there.

I was merely explaining how one comes to this line of thinking which is what OP was asking about. I also mentioned some holes in this logic so I think it’s clear it’s not an opinion I actually hold.

If you ride a bus without a ticket, other passengers will have to pay more because upkeep and salaries are more or less a fixed cost. That is if you can afford the ticket, it’s irrelevant otherwise. Also depends on profit margins but I think it explains the point.

That was my point though. Soviet / post-soviet countries are effectively very hyperindividualistic despite enforced societal conformance. There’s this perceived ingenuity where people will go great lengths to come up with clever ways of skirting the law. It’s what makes it incredibly hard for society to become mature enough to rely on systemic solutions to problems and gives way to authoritarian rule.

Piracy is fine and mostly harmless but I don’t like idolizing it because there can be a really dark undertone to it.

I’d say Putin is a product of society that allows anything as long as you don’t rock the boat and steal only from the people you’re allowed to.

Early V1 can be soft modded which is much more hassle-free, new ones require a modchip.

Correct me if this changed but you can pay for premium in India with a regular card, you just have to provide fake billing address. I’ve been doing this for years now so maybe I’m grandfathered into some old payment scheme but I’m fairly sure my gf did this recently too when she had to switch from Argentina.

It’s telling that you’re completly skipping over content creators.

I’m perfectly aware. Everyone keeps saying that piracy is a convenience issue but people seem to go great lengths to get YouTube for free given how expensive it is to run and how much value it provides.

I had good luck with paying for YouTube Premium. Can use a VPN to get it so dirt cheap I wouldn’t bother with working around it.

YouTube Premium includes YouTube Music and their fight against adblock and background play on free tier is part of appeasing copyright holders who get their cut just fine. There’s gray area but Google can’t flat out pirate music without getting sued into oblivion.

Guy wanted to vent about smart thermostats, explicitly said he doesn’t need advice and got bajillion responses with advice, mostly from FOSS folks who couldn’t contain themselves. I’d be annoyed too.

What do you use Facebook for?

In terms of replacements with somewhat close feature sets there’s Friendica. It’s ActivityPub based like Lemmy and Mastodon. But ultimately it’s usually about people and groups you interact with and they probably won’t be there.