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2023-05-25 22:16:14Z (last updated 2023-10-16 08:55:03Z)
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.
Here's my current list of services I consider to have reasonable subscriptions:
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
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!)
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.
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