Hey, long time lurker on lemmy but I have never posted before. I just wanted to express my gratitude to the piracy community for the contributions, philosophy, and megathread which have been extremely consequential in my life. I started my piracy journey about a year and a half ago. I was a broke asf student living off of loans in low income housing with my partner. I watched over the years as the world changed from blockbuster to streaming to everything becoming a subscription. I saw what everyone else was seeing, the transition to rentier capitalism, to a world where everything is a subscription and we own nothing and are expected to be happy. I, the same as all of you, thoroughly reject that notion. You can hardly even buy a dvd anymore, and even if you do, it is expected that you forgoe the convinience of streaming media. I had already been pirating textbooks for years at that point like many of my fellow students, but I started becoming anxious that I would loose access to my favourite shows, movies, and video games. I think the high prices of retro games and not being able to watch pokemon on one streaming service got to me, and then there was that whole always online thing with the crew game and the stop killing games movement. I was done, so I came here. I started off with just a couple of games and movies, but then I decided I wanted my own personal library. I have purchased several harddrives and I store all my games, movies, shows, and books on my harddrives and stream what I can using Jellyfin. I used to think that technology was bad, that it was something that stole your attention span, but ever since I started pirating, I feel like that sense of independence around technology has taken a hold of me. I idealize a world where we all share software for free, media is made for the love of the art, and we don't pay obscene amounts of money for media that we already own. It is my hope to continue expanding my knowledge of computers, and continue to make them work for me rather than the other way around. I am especially excited now that I completed my degree that I can focus on learning about computers more as a hobby. This community has inspired me to take technology into my own hands and I just wanted to express my gratitude for all the good that this community does.
