Also it's unlikely it actually almost died

I was thinking this while setting up RomM a few months back. Each media stack I'm running has a bit of a different reasoning behind it, but at the end of the day it's more about convenience and owning my own library than anything cost-related.

My Jellyfin server exists because streaming services are a nightmare. Overpriced as hell, extremely limited libraries, things constantly coming and going.

I use Navidrome because Spotify supports genocide and Tidal felt too limited, and neither pays artists well. While most of my library is pirated, I make it a point to buy directly from the artists whenever possible - whether that's digital downloads, vinyl, or merch, direct support goes much further than streaming services ever will.

RomM is about preservation and convenience for my emulation library. These aren't hard to find online, sure, but knowing I have my own copies feels like a safety net in case of more shutdowns and lawsuits.

I'm thinking the same - i for example have nearly every fitgirl release stored and backuped. there is no way i can ever play them all, but last time i checked i have quite a few games that are not available to buy anymore because they were pulled from steam/gog/epic. sometime in the future i will work on making all of these games available again.

In general I agree, but my understanding is that the pirate streams of live sporting events were cracked down on quite hard. There was definitely a dip at one point where the high quality SopCast and Ace Stream broadcasts that had become very popular for competitions like the Premier League (e.g. Bloodzeed) disappeared quite suddenly and weren't replaced with anything comparable.

If it wasn't for piracy I would have just kept reading books. Instead, I just watch all the bullshit.

EDIT: Most of the time, the people who make shows have a much better imagination than mine

I get a stellar service from my mate's Plex server that he doesn't charge me to access. If there's something I want, I request it through some automated service he has and within no time at all it's ready to watch.

This comment made my day

The second that valve goes public and gets horribly enshittified , it will grow exponentially.

Music piracy, while still a thing, is basically nil at this point, because the record industry didn't fuck up streaming (for the consumer). The artists don't get paid enough, but from a consumer perspective you don't have to sub to all the services to get all of the music.

We were so close to that with Netflix back in the beginning. Then the studios got greedy, and here we are.

How exactly is Steam consumer friendly? Or is the bar so low that companies that don't shoot themselves in their feet by mistake because they were actually aiming for the customer are considered "consumer friendly"?

I thought that crazy terf was cracking denuvo games?

That is called engagement farming, pretty common on YouTube, there are probably 50 videos like this released in the past month, they just copy paste from each other, each getting hundreds and thousands of views.

The only noticeable decline in piracy came in the year when Netflix got famous, which got reverted in the next few years due to the launch of another 100 Streaming sites and netflix's enshittification.