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And if you use your imagination, it’s more eco-friendly.

Come to think of it, unless you’re doing something that requires fewer calories, other activities would likely have a bigger carbon footprint.

brb, taking a break from the internet to help the environment.

Yeah, even Toy Story 1 animation is dated, which is feature-quality, not TV, and it came out after Reboot.

I admire the historic technical feat. For example, they didn’t have inverse kinematics back then, meaning they couldn’t plant the character’s feet on the ground or hands on a surface and move the body without the limbs moving as well. They’d have to repose the hands and feet to line up. It’s why so many shots don’t show their feet unless they’re standing still and why the boy (enzo?) is always diving into the shot.

I wanted something similar from a remote company I was working for. They were pretty good about fulfilling requests, but when I asked for a good kvm switch they said they had trouble in the past and instead recommended a usb hub that can toggle between machines. Then connect both machines to the same monitor and toggle the input. Not ideal, but low cost and functional. Might not suit your needs (would be annoying if you have to frequently toggle back and forth), but if you’re just trying to share your desk space between a work machine and personal, and the monitor input is easy to toggle, it’s worth considering.

I don’t think they have the ux advantage that their wealth suggests due to misaligned incentives. A good portion of their investment is getting users to see as many ads as they will tolerate. Try to modify any privacy settings, for example, and the ux is as garbage as amazon.

Fediverse and self hosted, open source alternatives are still relatively new. Folks have to expect some turbulence. As things grow and more bug reports and contributions can be made, the ux could be superior because they can give users what they want instead of maximizing monetization.

Misskey is a federated facebook alternative I heard about on mastodon recently. I’m not too familiar with it myself, but seems worth mentioning.

It has a “groups” feature that might avoid the “instance per person” lemmy workaround you were thinking about. According to this comparison misskey doesn’t have a like button, but a few of its forks do. Not sure about the upload experience; may depend on the app. I didn’t see any clients listed on their site but did a quick search for an iOS app, which exists, so i assume android, too.

Sorry I don’t have more info, but I hope that’s useful. Best of luck! I’ll be looking for a similar solution in the near future.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts. My only source of income for more than a decade has been creating media that people stream or watch in theaters, so I must disagree. Under the current capitalist system, people do get paid, but I’m with you that it’s exploitative. People commonly burnout and run themselves ragged trying to make ends meet. I know I did.

I’m skeptical that piracy hurts CEOs and shareholders as much as you think it does. Piracy is nothing new-- CEO wages and capitalism doesn’t seem to care. Those with power can increase prices on paying customers, decrease employee wages or headcounts, and/or start legally pursue pirates. The latter being least relevant to my point, but with digital steganography, watermarking, intrusive tracking, and corporate-friendly laws (see post)-- it’s worth making clear that CEOs and shareholders have plenty of tools already in place to make themselves whole. Heck, pirate from Prime Video and Bezos can increase AWS rates and extract it back from most folks via services they (or their families) do pay for.

Not to say it’s hopeless. I’d like to shine a gigantic spotlight on your last sentence:

indy games/music/etc bought directly from the creators

That’s the way forward. Heck, toss it on a jellyfin server and share it with a few close friends and family. The knowledge gap to do that is shrinking. When many folks know someone who knows how to host, they can start pooling their resources.

The false dichotomy of stream vs pirate mentioned in my first reply could be rephrased as: spending money and attention on media giants vs spending just attention on them. Why not spend neither money nor attention on media giants? Save it for individuals and small teams making cool things. That creates a market and draws in more people to make more cool things and does more damage than piracy. Personally, I don’t see anything on Disney+ (or prime, netflix, etc) worth prolonging the current state of media, so I don’t waste any time on it. I’ve come across a lot of good books, music, and inexpensive hobbies to fill the void in the meantime.

TL;DR: Current state of media sucks, but pays more than pirates. More pirates not paying is not as effective as retraining money and attention. If a pirate occasionally goes through the extra steps to pay someone instead of finding a torrent link, they’re still dedicating significant time engaging with the winners of the current capitalist system instead of seeking out and boosting better, lesser known options. It drags out the current state instead of nurturing existing solutions.

I agree with (and experience) the problems surrounding access to media that you described, but I would also describe myself as pretty anti-piracy. You can be anti-middleman and anti-rent-seeking without being pro-piracy. While piracy circumvents the problems you mentioned, the question it leaves unanswered is how the creator of the pirated media will afford basic necessities like food and shelter. Alternatives to streaming are scarce, but they do exist-- especially DRM-free music and books. These are not static systems. The market will follow the money, so if folks buy into the false dichotomy of stream vs pirate, industry will continue to invest in DRM and anti-piracy measures and creators will continue to submit to streaming services / media silos. I’d prefer a system with as few layers as possible between creator and consumer. Piracy only offers a solution for the latter.