This is exactly how post-capitalism was predicted to go. As consolidation eliminates competition, there's no reason to maintain quality. If it's crap or nothing, people have to buy the crap.
irotsoma
I mean, they just called them algorithms or targeted discount codes or sales before. The addition of "AI" is just marketing nonsense for shareholders.
It would have been good if it had been made all that usable. Many people were looking for a place to have all of their media in one. Smart TVs weren't the default like now, so they were trying to take the market from things like Roku and Apple TV and such. Still could have been useful if they had made it better than the crappy Smart TV interfaces (which wouldn't have taken much), but they never did, so it never really caught on.
If you want something similar, you could set up a cheap VPS with your own reverse proxy making sure that all of your connections are secure between the servers and VPS. But it really depends on your situation. If you have an ISP that assigns you a block of static IPv6 addresses, it's fairly easy to then get a domain and direct based on subdomains to those addresses. I'm not lucky enough to have a halfway decent ISP available in my area, so I can't get that or even a reasonably priced single IPv4 address for residential service, so I have to make due with dynamic DNS which makes things more complex. I fortunately don't have an ISP that forces double NAT on me at least. So I have set up a VPS with a reverse proxy and Wireguard VPN tunnel and I use cloudflare as my domain registrar and their DDNS which I update using my OPNSense router which is also the endpoint of the VPN. I've been considering moving to hosting headscale on the VPS instead, but haven't gotten around to it. It really depends on how many servers, his many services, if you have a domain, if you have a VPS or itger server outside of your home network, if your ISP gives static IPs, and you are behind a double nat kind of situation. Also depends a lot on your bandwidth. Having low upload speeds is a common problem especially if you have cable internet service. I'm lucky enough to have symmetrical fiber direct to my modem even if the ISP is way behind and doesn't offer IPv6 other than 6rd which was meant to be a transitional system like two decades ago and is barely functional.
I mean yeah that's the plan. Use AI. Let Nazis be Nazis. Suppress vulnerable minorities. That's what has happened to most social media in the US over the last few years. No surprises. Just need to get people to move off those platforms to ones with better policies and moderated communities like Lemmy, Mastodon, etc. But that's always hard to do.
It's just a hosted reverse proxy with a proprietary server backend, as far as I can tell. I don't usually trust "free" things lime that. It's not that expensive to do it yourself, the real expense come in high bandwidth flowing through the proxy which most self hosted applications for personal use don't really do.
Anyway, with a reverse proxy on the security end there's a chance of man in the middle attacks depending on the configuration. And on the privacy end, they will have the ability to log all connections. That may be where they're planning to make money by selling that info and/or allowing MiTM attacks to inject ads like many ISPs have talked about. But "free" stuff usually isn't actually free in the long term even if it is now while it's being tested. Usually just takes a sale to a large corporation for it to become less free even of the original intent wasn't to do that.
Lifetime never means your lifetime. It's the lifetime if the offer or if you're lucky, the current ownership of the company. I've always weighed them as, is this cost significantly less than the cost of the product over the amount of time I think the product might be useful to me and the development of the product is likely to stay on track.
I have one for Plex that I got very early on and was well worth it even though I'm moving away from Plex. And one for 1TB of storage on rsync.net which will pay for itself in 5 years and hopefully will survive for another 5 after that at least for me to consider it more than worth it. After that it's all bonus. I don't expect it to be around in 20 years or for it to be worth nearly as much then either as storage needs grow and costs shrink. But when I got it a couple of years ago I deemed it worth the gamble.
Really the first issue is your IP address. How does your ISP hand out IP addresses IPv4 and/or IPv6?
If you have an ISP that gives a static block of IPv6 addresses that simplifies things immensely. But also consider that many legacy, monopoly ISPs have not implemented IPv6 for their customers, especially in the US, and so domains without an IPv4 address aren't accessible from people's homes that use those ISPs. But it means you could assign static IPv6 addresses to each service if you wanted to and add subdomains for each. Then you just need to deal with security on that system.
Otherwise you'll likely need to deal with dynamic DNS. If your router and your domain registrar's DNS can work together for DDNS that's ideal. For example, my OpnSense router updates my cloudflare registered domain directly when my ISP changes my IPv4 address (I have one of those ISPs that doesn't assign IPv6 still but I don't have any choice if I want > 5-10Mbps upload speeds).
Then you need to deal with routing. The best way is with a reverse proxy like Caddy or I actually like Traefik a lot because it works well with my complex setup with docker and kubernetes among other things. Basically your router needs to route all the inbound traffic on the appropriate inbound ports to the reverse proxy to it to then route to the appropriate service based on the subdomain and/or port of the request.
Once you route the subdomain to the appropriate service you need to deal with security. Once a service is exposed, it's going to eventually start getting hit by bots trying to access it. Best to implement something like fail2ban to stop them from wasting your processing power with failed logins and 404 errors and such.
I set up separate VLANs for devices that do or don't get filtering with different DNS servers assigned. And I have two different wifi SIDs on my access point for the different VLANs as well as having ports on my primary switch aligned to one or the other VLAN. I did end up having one other switch that has devices from both VLANs in a different area and had to set up one port on the primary switch with a couple of MAC-based filters for assigning the VLAN for just devices on that remote switch, but those are static devices, so that wasn't an issue. I don't attach any other devices to that.
My servers that have been around for a while get thousands of scans per day. In fact I am going to move away from crowdsec because I exceed the free limits on log entries within the first day of the month usually, sometimes just an hour or so. I mean it still works and blocks stuff, but the web portal is basically useless for any research into what I need to give attention to. That and the fact that you can no longer delete decisions on the web portal with the free account.
I bet the show summaries are going to be a big target for media companies. I remember when they went on rampages in the 90s and 00s against fan sites that had synopses of episodes and this is way more than a simple paragraph or two synopsis of the shows.
No reason to innovate when there's basically no competition. It's a problem of consolidation in many industries these days. Most governments are owned by big corporations that water down and keep them from enforcing antitrust laws these days.