I owe my entire life to piracy.

I learned all I know on pirated software, and all the jobs that I’ve ever held are entirely attributable to it.

Did I shaft the software vendors I pirated the software of? Absolutely. But! I’m also very well paid and I pay a lot of taxes thanks to my ill-gotten skills. So overall, I contributed to society as a whole orders of magnitude more than I stole from the individual software vendors.

Of course, I recognize that this sort of logic is self-serving and leaves the software vendors I shafted without any money. But… just sayin’. There’s more than one face to this coin.

As for media - music, movies and such, I’ve almost never purchased any. I bought a few LPs as a kid before my parents bought me a cassette player (and more importantly, recorder). After that, I never ever paid a single dime for any media I’ve ever consumed. Never. And I still don’t.

I make no apology for this: it’s theft pure and simple. The only weak justification I can offer is that if I tried to purchase music or movies, it would be inconvenient to procure, DRM’ed, force shit I don’t want to watch down my throat, like those stupid unskippable FBI warnings on DVDs, and the pirated versions of mp3s and movies are much more user-friendly and resistant to time and deprecation. But at the end of the day, I fully admit that I’m a shameless freeloader.

The only thing I pay for religiously is books. No particular reason why I respect writers more than musicians or film directors… It’s just like that. I want writers to get paid.

It’s okay. Yes, the megarich will become even richer, but it’s worth the sacrifice because the price of eggs will come down eventually.
Any minute now…

That’s the exact kind of messy migration I want to avoid.

Agreed. I wish I could transfer my SDF communities over here but it’s not possible, sadly.

Whatever they once were, they suck now.

Whatever it is, as a SDF member, I curse the day I decided to support them. I paid SDF because I believe in paying for what I use, and it turns out to be the worst service I use by a long shot. Why I didn’t open my first Lemmy account on a more reliable instance for free, I’ll never know…