Having recently set sail again after a more than a decade-long hiatus, I am definitely having a much better experience. All streaming services have been booted, and my TV has been disconnected from the internet. Replaced with a mini-PC running Linux and serving Jellyfin (and Freetube for accessing YouTube ad-free). Still have an active Spotify subscription, but I am already using it a lot less than before. Will be phasing it out as my music collection becomes more complete. Purchased my first albums from Bandcamp recently - first direct purchase of music in over a decade. Bad timing with the Bandcamp acquisition though, hoping it doesn’t go tits up, and if so - here’s hoping to a good alternative to get proper ownership over DRM-free music while giving me an opportunity to pay and support those musicians I like who are not already filthy rich.
For music you could try collecting Vinyl. No DRM can take that away from you.
What do you use to torrent? Do you have any recommendations to do this safely?
TOR browser and a decent VPN.
Personally use Nord VPN but guessing from how infrequently it gets recommend by folks on lemmy I’m guessing it’s not the best.
Tor is good but not practical for piracy, a VPN is more than enough. That said nord is quite a bad option. In general if a company sponsors in yt, its a bad product
Yeah I get the same impression from the general chatter but no one seems to ever say what’s bad about NordVPN. I find their software pleasing to use, the meshnet functionality saves me some trouble, and the speeds seem to be very high and it’s reliable.
There’s other stuff their marketing material speaks to that people can choose to believe or not, but the above is why I subscribed.
If folks ever shared good, verifiable reasons to not use them I’d certainly look elsewhere.
Also - what’s not practical about Tor? Seems perfectly practical for my purposes.
While tor is good speed may be an issue.
As with any VPN its a transfer of trust, do you trust nord?
I trust Nord as much as I trust any VPN that has independent audits of their no-log policy.
And yes Tor is slow, but I dont think that makes in impractical, you’re trading privacy for speed.