Fuck yeah this is awesome! The detail of Immich integration is just the icing on top of an awesome cake!

How demanding is it on server resources? Am I likely to be able to run it on an old Raspberry Pi that’s also running a couple of other relatively light tasks? How much storage does it end up using over time? I’m probably going to try and get it running either on my Pi or my Synology NAS, though the latter has had issues with Docker containers in the past depending on the container’s dependencies…

Most of this comment was my own speculation based on the details they’ve shared publicly. The details I know of publicly are:

• The seem to be profitable. Or at least in a relatively sustainable place; they talk about profit a lot, but usually in terms of how the “profit” is split between creators. I forget, maybe the Wendover “history of Nebula” video from a while back talked more specifically about profitability?
• They’re choosing not to take outside investment. This is something the CEO, Dave Wiskus, talked about particularly with respect to the Lifetime subscriptions, describing those as their option for building up the sort of large amounts of cash that they might otherwise have gone to outside investment for, in order to fund bigger projects
• The fact that they are, quite visibly, expanding their range of content

The rest was me speculating about how the business model would seem to work based on those factors plus my limited, layperson’s, understanding of their industry.

I will check these out

FWIW the specific channels I recommended were mostly based on stalking your user profile and grabbing a couple I thought might interest you based on that. But I didn’t have much to go on from your Lemmy history specifically. They weren’t necessarily the first ones I’d recommend to someone in the general public, or to someone whose interests I knew better.

if only I could figure out how to use peertube

From my experience trying Peertube, its biggest problem for now is just…the server infrastructure of existing instances isn’t very good. I got really bad buffering. Maybe better server-side encoding could have helped with that. Maybe they need stronger server hardware with better outbound network connections. Maybe I just need to find a more locally-hosted instance to me. Maybe it’s something else. But the user experience was really not good. Which is a shame. As nice as Nebula’s sort of worker-owned co-op model is, true federated video would be really nice for those of us not privileged enough to become a member of the exclusive club. YouTube being basically the only real option really sucks, and I’m sick of alternative options like Gfycat dying off and losing all their content.

From everything I’ve heard, they’re already profitable, and are explicitly choosing only to grow in a sustainable way, without taking on outside investment which could force them into enshittifying down the line. With a relative lack of need to show extreme growth, and a lack of reliance on outside factors like advertising (being subscription-based), the only major risk that I can see for them long-term is user churn. Which is definitely a risk, but with the ever-creeping growth of the range of content they have and (at least for now) an attitude of being customer-friendly, churn seems a relatively low risk.

As far as I can see, at worst, the platform dies if the YouTube channels of the people on the platform die because of the YouTube algorithm, and they get bad churn (with fewer new subscribers because of the aforementioned dead YouTube channels at the top of the funnel), and they don’t get new more successful channels on before that happens. A scenario that’s far from unlikely, but which I would describe as “catastrophic, whether or not Nebula exists today”, so its existence for now as a hedge against more likely bad scenarios is still worthwhile.

I’ve never heard of dropout or nebula. At all

I must admit, I find that astonishing. Not that the average person on the street wouldn’t have heard of them, but that someone online enough to be having these sorts of conversations wouldn’t have.

Are you familiar with CollegeHumor, perhaps? After their corporate owners got screwed around by Facebook’s pivot to video (and the fraudulent data involved), they were going to shut down CH entirely until the head of the creative group reached an agreement to buy it out, and under his ownership he created the private streaming service Dropout. Today it’s mostly entirely private, with promotional content like the occasional episode or clips uploaded as Shorts put onto YouTube.

Nebula got its start as a sort of multi-channel network owned by and for YouTube creators, to avoid many of the big pitfalls that MCNs became known for. Its earliest more well-known members are Sam from Wendover/Half As Interesting, Brian from Real Engineering, Colin from CGP Grey, and Philip from Kursgesagt. The latter two later left over “creative differences” (leaks have seemed to imply, basically, that they wanted to keep it a small elite group at the core which could profit from increased growth while adding more creators, while the rest of the people then involved wanted a more equitable arrangement). It’s since grown to way too many channels to name, but if you’re interested you can see the full list here. A few choice selections might include tech reporter TechAltar (whose recent “1 month without US tech giants” and the Nebula Plus follow-up “Which alternatives am I sticking with?” video are reminiscent of the one this thread is about), astrophysicist Angela Collier, Canadian cultural commentator J.J. McCullough, history & video game design analysis channels Extra History & Extra Credits, TLDR News, human geography (with a focus on conflicts) from RealLifeLore. Linus from LTT has talked about Nebula once or twice, though his commentary on it gets wildly wrong, claiming it was a sort of pump & dump scheme where the main goal was to sell to private equity or something, seemingly because he’s projecting his own techbro capitalist attitude onto them. As I sort of mentioned above, Nebula basically serves as an uber-patreon. You pay a single subscription fee (when I signed up it was $30 per year, but it may have changed) to get mostly content that could be gotten for free (but with ads) on YouTube, plus some bonus content, some stuff a bit earlier, and a few Nebula Originals. Lindsay Ellis might be the most notable one there. Since getting harassed off the Internet by Twitter, all her videos have been Nebula Originals apart from 2 promoting her new book.

Neither of these are really meant to be a complete YouTube replacement, but rather a way for them to create more control over their stuff and get the stability of knowing they aren’t relying on the fickle YouTube algorithm (and the whims of YouTube censorship).

It’s not easy, but you’re not guaranteed to end up

either lose your shirt, sell your business, or become entrenched in a position whose inertia is difficult to break

It depends on the personalities involved and the business model they go with.

Nebula has done really well with consistent growth as a premium offering where people pay one subscription fee to get ad-free videos from exclusively high-quality creators across a quote broad range of niches, in addition to bonus extras and Nebula Originals.

Dropout seems to have a lot of success with a range of mostly unscripted comedy, centred around a core cast of trusted comedic actors with a larger range of guests.

Floatplane, on the other hand, seems much less successful, probably owing to its business model being basically Patreon’s, but only for video. Instead of the wide range of content you get for surprisingly reasonable amounts of Nebula and Dropout, Floatplane ends up looking very expensive if you want to support more than one or two creators. Plus the creators on it haven’t got the same degree of trust; it ends up reeking of the sort of techbro vibes that people are explicitly trying to get away from.

Well, there is Nebula, which is kinda like that. But most of them also put their videos on YouTube, using Nebula as the premium ad-free option with a little bonus content.

the official app tries to not be killed by Android woth the usual tricks (permanent notification, disabling battery optimisation)

…

You can (theoretically) control how often locations are tracked and sent but for me was using the location service constantly and draining battery quite a bit.

Ah. Those are exactly what I was worried about. It’s not able to just happen entirely in the background the same way Google’s feature does, then? Kind of automagically?

But not exactly how the app works. If it’s a Strava-like app you have to remember to run in the foreground, the value is a lot lower to me than something that either uses or replicates GPS’ automatic background behaviour.

How exactly does it work from your phone’s perspective? Does it hook into Google Play Services location data? Do you need to install a different low-level application that replicates that functionality? (If so, what’s the battery life impact like?) Does it need a foregrounded app?

I’m really interested in this, because like the author I’m really upset at Google killing yet another incredibly useful feature. But the article is a little light on details.

Collapses? Wish Amazon would collapse after it was revealed their magic grocery store where you just walk out with what you want was just Indians viewing CCTV.

I never actually put any serious effort into using MuseScore myself before the changes, so I can’t comment from extensive personal experience.

But as a musician, I did use scores written by someone in MuseScore, as well as ones written in Sibelius. And I could always tell when it was MuseScore. I’m sure it was possible to write good looking scores in MuseScore 2, but it clearly did not make it easy. The scores were obviously inferior in terms of layout and design compared to those produced in Sibelius. Basic things like spaces between notes not being the right proportion, or dynamic markings appearing as plain italic text instead of the usual bold dynamics would be wrong in MuseScore far more often than in Sibelius.

As a general rule, a good UX should:

1. Make it very, very easy to do (or discover how to do) the most common basic things, and should result in them being done in the way a user expects
2. Not slow down a power user from accomplishing basic tasks at speed
3. Allow easy discovery of and access to less common tasks

A lot of designed-by-software-engineer FOSS applications do a good job of 2 and an ok job of 3, but fail at 1.

Interesting. That would make his survey of rather limited value, in my opinion, because just by doing notes (including rests), durations (just from semiquaver to semibreve, including tie and dot), and accidentals, you get 18, right off the bat. Considering the ranges offered in the poll he made were 1–5, 5–10, 10–20, and 20+ (never mind the overlap if you happened to use exactly 5 or 10…), that makes it very hard for anyone who types their note input instead of hunting around slowly with the mouse to get into anything other than the top bucket. Especially since he quite explicitly said “including typical ones (like Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Z, etc.)”

Unfortunately Sibelius’s development has basically stagnated since 2012 when the new corporate owners fired the entire original development team, with only one noteworthy release of the core app (not counting side-projects like an iPad app) since then, in 2014.

I first learnt Sibelius on its pre-ribbon interface, which I think was much better (even though I loved the ribbon in MS Office). That certainly made the transfer to more modern versions easier. Still, although Sibelius has a number of specific hangups in its interface that make fairly common activities awkward and unintuitive, I really do think it has the best basic flow. When you’re just in the zone inputting notes, it’s so easy to use in a way MuseScore isn’t.

I actually take some issue with Tantacrul’s design process, because it feels like he fundamentally doesn’t understand how intermediate users like myself use the app. At one point he sent out a survey asking “how many keyboard shortcuts do you use?” in Sibelius/MuseScore etc. The problem was that he didn’t define what a keyboard shortcuts is, and when people asked for his definition, he just snarkily responded that it would be obvious. But it’s not. In Sibelius, you use your left hand on letters A–G to enter the note pitch, and your right hand on the notepad to enter rhythm values and common articulations. Slur lines and some other things can be entered during this process as well (slurs with the letter S).

Does this count as keyboard shortcuts? To me, everything I described above except maybe the slurs is actually the musical equivalent of typing text into a word processor…or a browser text box, like I’m doing right now. Does it become a “keyboard shortcut” just because it can also be done by clicking a rhythm value in a toolbar, and then clicking a location in the staff to choose pitch? I have no idea if Tantacrul thinks so, because he chose snark rather than clarifying.

Incidentally, his MuseScore design replicates this flow, but without the visual reference of the keypad toolbar that lets you learn and easily see what number to press, without requiring sheer memorisation. It’s been a while since I last tried it, but I vaguely recall having other issues with the flow being hard to work out with a keyboard. Great if you’re just slowly mousing around everywhere, but not for the intermediate user trying to get in the zone.

Which is such a shame, because he did such a fantastic job of the other stuff. The user onboarding, score setup, page layout management, etc. The attention to detail even with small things like music fonts and symbol design is impeccable.

That whole series is absolutely brilliant, but it’s hard to go past the Sibelius one if I’m gonna go back to one. And I say that as a long-time Sibelius user who can comfortably work much faster in it than in any of the alternatives.

The open source music notation software MuseScore used to be really, really bad. A musician and UX designer gave it a scathing review in a humorous YouTube video. And then the company behind MuseScore hired that YouTuber and spent a lot of effort doing a major redesign, and now it’s actually quite good.

All it takes is for the people in charge of the project to put aside their hubris and trust that sometimes, programmers aren’t the best designers, and to get people who are trained in designing and evaluating user interfaces to do the job. And to perform adequate user testing.

This is ridiculous. There’s no way a client calls a dolly a “pan”.

That’s obviously zooming.

I actually wouldn’t mind upgrading to Windows 11, but I ran Microsoft’s compatibility tool and it told me I couldn’t. I only built my computer in late 2018, and have upgraded storage space since then. But it’s nowhere near old enough to need replacing the motherboard or processor.

Microsoft is just requiring an arbitrary hardware specification as an olive branch to their hardware manufacturer partners.

Read as in, with their eyes? Or how to ingest it into some other app/script? Cos I’m vaguely aware that awk can be used in some way for this, but wouldn’t have a clue how.

Good post.

Wrong community.