With a few quotes to highlight the frustrating situation:
That’s because OverDrive, a private corporation, has a monopoly on managing the availability and distribution of ebooks and audiobooks for government-funded public libraries in North America. (I looked for exact current numbers, but turns out that would require the time and resources of a professional journalist.^1^ Best I could do: as of December 2019, OverDrive controlled digital lending for “more than 95% of public libraries in the US and Canada”.^2^)
Emphasis added.
Right away I saw that in June 2020, OverDrive was sold to global investment firm KKR. […] The private equity firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, I quickly learned, was either the inventor of, or an early pioneer in, basically all the Shitty Business Practices: leveraged buyouts, corporate raiding, vulture capitalism. They’ve been at it since the 1970s and they’re still going strong. […] Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile. They are the World Champions of Grabbing All The Money And Leaving Everyone Else In The Shit.
[…]
And if OverDrive goes belly-up at some point in the future, crushed by KKR’s leveraged debt, it’s going to take down access to the digital catalogs of nearly every public library in North America.
@asklemmy How could users Monitise themselves on the Fediverse?
As people possibly move across to the Fediverse to find alternatives, we have to question how people are going to make a living on this amazing platform.
Can it be fully run by donations or is there a better way for people to be paid across the Fediverse?
That’s what Nostr is supposed to be for. Looking for ways to monetize decentralized social media.
I thought it was more interested in making a more censorship resistant form of online communication, with the crypto/monetization junk being tacked on as kind of an afterthought (but then amplified because cryptocurrency people are nothing if not vocal).
Can’t we have a place online where out data isn’t being sold, aren’t being bombarded with ads, or begged for subscriptions?
We can, and we do have some such spaces, thankfully. Another question to ask then is, could online workers have the sort of spaces where they’re not ceding their data to be sold by others, where they aren’t at the whims of corporate platforms wary of losing advertisers’ money, and being given scraps of the advertising money and pressed to split their subscription revenue with corporations making billions?
If people don’t want them in the fediverse, and people are sick of the corporate web (either in part or in whole because of online workers there), where are online workers to try to make their living?
I don’t know, but I do understand the exasperation at it all.
Opinion: It's about time a Steam service for TV existed
I know you can buy access to content to some TV shows on the Apple store, Amazon and the Microsoft Store - but these are still subject to geoblocks, not accessible in many countries and only offer a relatively small selection of TV shows anyway (and even then they're subject to this shit.)
Think about how video games have been fundamentally transformed. You can buy the majority of video games on Steam (or just use other similar apps). They're all basically released everywhere on day 1. They're automatically yours forever (until such a potential when Steam goes down - but you can easily extract and secure the files if you worry about that).
The same is not remotely true with TV. I understand that multiple streaming services were obviously going to emerge as TV production expanded. I understand that expecting to be able to watch everything on Netflix for £9.99 a month was never going to be realistic. But alongside these streaming services, a Steam-type client should've emerged allowing people to just buy seasons of content on the services. For people who want to legally keep what they watch, paying something like £5-15 per season (with sales much like Steam). No geoblocks. No restrictions.
I say this because in many cases I have had no choice but to pirate to watch a TV show season. It literally was not available to me through any legal source. I could not digitally buy it, nor was any streaming service accessible to me carrying it. This is now happening to Americans more and more (I am not American) with European series being heavily delayed. The last season of Babylon Berlin released in October. It's carried by Netflix in the USA, who are clearly not interested in acquiring the latest season - and are probably holding the content hostage (or Sky are being obstructive). It's also not accessible in France or many other European countries too.The show has suffered from staggered international releases since it was initially released, essentially throttling its popularity potential (most expensive German series ever made at one point).
As for me? I'm British. I could not, and still can't watch the second season of Balkan Shadows anywhere legally according to Justwatch. Paris Police 1900 season 2 is also still not accessible for me. This is really quite pathetic when you think about music and video games.
I’m a fan of physical media, but DRM free digital media is a viable alternative imo, so long as folks push for it. The problem is people treating the situation as an all or nothing, DRM-bound digital media or physical media, when there’s a decent middle ground in DRM free media.
So I did figure out that yes, #Mastodon can federate #Lemmy and #Kbin content. The problem is that Mastodon doesn't know what to do with it, so it (the group) looks like a user that boosts all posts and comments.
I found myself browsing the "federated group" @selfhosted over on https://kbin.social, as I think Kbin has a nicer UX for it.
I didn't really want to create a separate account for group stuff, but that might be what we do in the short term. 🤔
Lmao, the best part of this goof is that you accidentally demonstrated a way to sort of post with separate title/body text.
It looks like a title may only be 90 characters on Lemmy, so I guess you could make the title text then pad out with spaces (or whatever) to then separate out into distinct body text.
A few questions (well, I have like 20 but I’m just sticking to a few rn..) for a new mobile browser user:
How can I see local only content on kbin? I like the kbin content more rn and am getting a bit overwhelmed with all of the posts & instances/magazines I am not as interested in taking up the main feed. But with it being new to me I don’t wanna just stick to my subscribed magazines since there may be a bunch of new growing ones I’d wanna see on my feed. Any way to do this? Another way to put it, I’d like to unfederate my feed - take me back to yester-night
Is there any way to minimize the post or a comment tree? It’s probably the only feature that I haven’t seen on kbin.social that I really want. it’s taking me soooo long to get through some comment feeds and the posts do take up a bit of space on the main feed.
Is there a way yo subscribe to a post or “save” it? This is something I haven’t seen on any instance and while it’s not a major issue for me, I’d love to see it! I don’t always have the time to read a post but I wanna check back later. Any way to do that or do the people on Reddit who always comment “Commenting so I can save this post for later” finally have a leg up on me?
Thanks! Really enjoying kbin. Love this instance’s chill, community feel.
On mobile browser to limit the feed to local, it looks like you want to tap the top left "hamburger" menu (three horizontal lines), then the triangle icon to the left of the cog/gear and set federation status to off.
For minimizing/collapsing comment trees, I don't think that's been implemented in kbin yet (a small reason I'm on Lemmy instead tbh).
As to subscribing or saving posts, I can't say without being on there. The closest I can see from my outside perspective is boosting a post, which seems to act like favoriting/bookmarking in other contexts. I don't get the sense that it's intended to be used as a subscription/saving method, but it may have to do for the time being. Other kbin folks may have better insight here than me though.