Ooh haven’t seen this, gonna be a fun read today. Thanks for the link!

Using it for porn sounds funny to me given the whole concept of “rule 34” being pretty ubiquitous. If it exists, there’s porn of it! Like even from a completely pragmatic prespective, it sounds like generating pictures of cats. Surely there is a never ending ocean of cat pictures which you can search and refine, do you really need to bring a hallucination machine into the mix? Maybe your friend has an extremely specific fetish list that nothing else will scratch? That’s all I can think of.

Yeah, giving Google unfettered access to your attention span with their algorithm (or any giant corporation) is just a disaster waiting to happen. None of them are interested in your well being or helping you in any way, only to keep you engaging, and to try pushing narratives to the masses. These very same algorithms also determine how creators act and what they post, since disobeying the nebulous ‘algorithm’ results in having your video cratered.

As for PeerTube, I will tell you right out of the gate it won’t be a major supplement to offset something like YouTube watch time. You will find some fun though, it’s quite cool watching super indie stuff you end up enjoying, think like 2005 tier YT where people just kinda post stuff for fun. If you are a creative (e.g. artist, musician, maker, tech reviewer) and have the rights to your videos, MakerTube is the instance I’m on, and they would be happy to have you (my channel). If you aren’t a maker, you can browse the instance list and try to pick a server you’re comfortable with (all of them have an info page which shows their rules and what you can do). I know that’s tedious and overwhelming though, so I spent a little bit mulling for something I’d consider acceptable as a starting point and found Peertube.wtf. They seem to be open signups, allow video uploads with a high limit, non-US, a proper no bigotry policy, looks good at a glance anyway!

I think we would also do well to consume less content frankly. I’m closing in on two years since I’ve stopped viewing YouTube videos, and watching creators on platforms like Nebula or just buying indie media has been fine enough honestly. I also donate a fair bit to a creative focused PeerTube instance for my short videos.

Don’t take this as an all or nothing call though. Reducing reliance on the YouTube monopoly for your eyes, and being more adversarial to YouTube to any degree more than before is a net positive. Run ad blockers, use alternative front ends like Invidious, directly download videos with YT-DLP, and redirect your content consumption to more friendly platforms (or just reduce watch time in general). There is no true alternative to YouTube, but that doesn’t mean we should throw in the towel, or refuse to reclaim any bit we can back.

You post shit? Well well, you’ve come to the right place!

I use Krita for everything, I love it so much. I also won’t act like it’s perfect either, despite it being my most used software by a landslide. Personally my biggest desire now is improved workflow for text editing (e.g. editing text directly on the canvas, being able to box and justify text, vector pathing for text so you can make it bend or wave). From what I understand it is something that is being worked on, and I will be even more indebted to the wonderful folks at KDE once further progress is made on that front.