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Subscriptions: The Reasonable and Unreasonable

2023-05-25T22:16:14Z (last updated 2023-05-25T22:20:43Z)

Subscriptions

A "subscription" in this post will be considered something you pay for and get in return for a period of time. This is not about subscribing to email lists or newsletters, those kinds of things.

I've thought about subscriptions more thoroughly during my shower time, and I think I have something more concrete of a reasonable subscription, and an unreasonable subscription.

A reasonable subscription

Here's my current list of services I consider to have reasonable subscriptions:

Sourcehut

Migadu

What both have in common is that they provide a service that makes sense to be paid:

• They have servers
• They handle your stuff
• Operating such services is not free

However, Sourcehut and Migadu are actually different services. Sourcehut is a full-fledged software forge, and Migadu is an email service (with lots of knobs and dials).

Now onto the unreasonable subscriptions

Unreasonable subscriptions

Types of subscriptions I don't consider reasonable, not even close:

• YouTube Red/Premium. You don't get a lot of value out of your subscription, and there are quite some limitations even on downloaded videos (resolution limitations, offline limitations, citation needed). `yt-dlp` is likely a much better choice because there are no stupid limitations enforced on you.
• Some app where you can make and post memes with its subscription to remove watermarks from the images. Why do I have to pay you to remove an arbitrary marking placed on my dumb image
• Smartphones. If you buy a new Smartphone every year, it's kind of a subscription. (Buying new smartphones every year is wasteful. Please stop being wasteful. Thanks!)

Heated seats in cars.

Yes, this is just an opinion piece

Hopefully it's pretty clear that this blog post is mainly an opinion piece. I originally thought of it as a quick post on my Fediverse instance, but then it quickly turned into a more serious piece and so I decided to settle on a blog post.

Other Links

YouTube premium limits (warning: bullshit quality a little too high for me)

public inbox (comments and discussions)

public inbox archives

(mailing list etiquette for public inbox)