If that was indeed the reason, then that only serves to support the notion that general disagreement, rather than just extremism, is what is being banned from that community. They have every right to ban advocates of genocide for extremism, but in no way do I think that supporting Palestine without supporting Hamas is a position worthy of a ban.

While I agree entirely that they're not free per-se, if it weren't for them, there would be nearly nothing to post for anyone who doesn't want to use the Epic Games Store.

Lemmy communities are already at a disadvantage to subreddits in terms of attracting and retaining users, so I don't think fracturing communities further than they already are across instances is beneficial.

While I admittedly haven't tried using Arctic's regex filtering options yet, if other Lemmy clients have similar functionality, I would imagine a filter for any post that includes "[Prime/" or "[Prime]" in the title would automatically hide the posts without the need for community fragmentation.

I get that, but if even the most interesting historical landmark in the world were being operated by a terrorist group, that alone is reason enough to pick another travel destination, in my opinion. Human rights aside, situations such as this demonstrate the safety risks that come with visiting such destinations.

It's a shame that there hasn't been extensive political support within Afghanistan itself to oust the Taliban, as I'm sure it would have tremendous tourism potential, given its historical landmarks and central location in Eurasia, if only it were safe to visit.

They're certainly a much worse value for the money and intentionally constrained in ways that maximize the profits of Apple services by making it inconvenient or impossible to use alternatives, but the UI is substantially better than Android. Aside from that and Apple device interoperability benefits, nearly any Android phone is a better choice for most people.

I think HDEncode and ReleaseBB are among the best DDL websites, though there's other options listed on the FMHY and Megathread lists. To make practical use of them though, you either need an expensive Rapidgator subscription or a more affordable debrid subscription (i.e. RealDebrid). If you use RealDebrid or AllDebrid, one method of finding releases is using Debrid Media Manager, which searches for cached releases that other users have already submitted to the debrid service you're subscribed to. As debrid downloads, in my experience at least, are often corrupted (resulting in errors either when extracting files from an archive or re-encoding a video in MKVToolNix), the best use of debrid services is to use it with an app like Stremio to have an all-in-one streaming service.

The other paid solution is usenet, which requires a NZB download program (i.e. NZBGet), a usenet indexer, and a usenet provider. The latter two usually require yearly subscriptions, but often have better results than can be found on DDL sites or public torrent trackers. While some usenet indexers are private, there are enough that are not to make waiting for open signups for those indexers optional. The public ones include altHUB, Miatrix, and NZB Finder, the private ones include DrunkenSlug and Tabula Rasa, while NZBGeek is public but is only free during a limited trial period, after which a subscription is needed. The free ones usually have a 5 downloads per day limit without a subscription. Note that Jdownloader is not a NZB download program, but rather one for regular downloads, and would instead be used for DDL site downloads.

For torrenting you need access to torrent trackers and a torrent download program. qBittorrent can do both if you add the Jackett plugin to it, though the best seeded (available for download) releases are often on semi-private and private torrent trackers. The best semi-private to start out with is TorrentLeech, given its lax seeding requirements compared to other private trackers. Keeping releases seeded on TorrentLeech gives you points over time that you can use to boost your ratio.

While I'd recommend using a paid VPN if you choose to go the route of torrenting, it's not essential if you instead use debrid and/or usenet subscriptions as in those cases you're not re-uploading downloaded releases to other users. If you'd rather not pay for any services, I'd recommend just using a site like MovieWeb to stream releases compiled from free streaming websites. While the quality is not always as good as can be had with the three options above, it works well for most use cases.

While Minesweeper's a great example, since random levels are a feature of nearly every Minesweeper iteration in existence, I mentioned in my post that I was excluding such games from the list. For those looking for such a game though, Globesweeper and Tilesweeper are great options.

While it doesn't have a free tier like other indexers do, NZBGeek marks the languages of multilingual releases on its search result page. Not sure why, but I haven't had nearly as much success in finding French releases on torrent trackers and usenet in contrast to their English counterparts, even for some shows that are French to begin with.

For some shows I've noticed that it's not too difficult to get around half of their seasons in 4K, with the 4K releases for the remaining seasons being seemingly nowhere, whether it be on public trackers, private trackers, or usenet. Doesn't seem to be an issue of shows only being shot in 4K after their first few seasons, as in some cases the 1st and 3rd seasons may have 4K releases without the 2nd season having one, for instance.

Don't have the *arr stack setup myself, but as to managing a library of of releases with both English and French dubbed audio I've found that looking for releases with 'Multi' in their names to be a relatively effective solution, though in trying to find releases on a handful of public French trackers looking for releases with 'VFF' (didn't see standalone 'VFQ' releases, though some VFF releases have VFQ audio tracks included as well) worked in that case as well. This seems to only work for popular movies, however, with TV shows and less popular movies, while sometimes being dubbed into French, seemingly not having those audio tracks anywhere I've looked (suggestions for good French torrent trackers would be welcome!), with the likelihood of finding English dubbed audio for releases originally in French appearing to be even more remote.

If you find a release with both audio tracks but want to use them with the video track of a better optimized monolingual release of the same movie, if the video tracks of two releases are the same length, or you can determine the exact offset between them, you can use MKVToolNix GUI to re-encode your preferred combination of video, audio, and subtitle tracks. A bit tedious compared to the automation of the *arr stack or simply keeping the default multilingual release of a movie, but at least it allows for fine-tuning individual releases on an as needed basis.

If you decide to make use of usenet at some point, I've found that some usenet indexers, such as NZBGeek, show in their search results the languages of additional audio tracks included in multilingual releases.

How often does abtorrents open registrations?

The monetary barrier to usenet is probably why torrent trackers would be more popular, and thus more likely to be blocked by national regulators. As to why you're far more likely to get an ISP letter for torrenting than for using usenet, while the bittorrent protocol means than if you download a release you're also seeding it to others, paying usenet providers for access to their cached releases means that you're only downloading releases from them, and not uploading anything. Usenet providers do sometimes have to remove releases from their databases upon request, which is why paying for providers on at least two nodes can help in mitigating the odds of a release not being available.

Comparing the cost of a VPN to Real-Debrid + a Usenet Indexer + A Usenet Provider depends on which services you choose, but in the case of ProtonVPN , NZBGeek, and Frugal Usenet it comes to $72 vs $84 a year, with the latter being more if you want to add a backup usenet block plan from a different node (block plans have a one-time upfront cost and last until you use up the plan's download capacity). If you forgo the additional block plan and NZBGeek, instead using a combination of the free tiers from indexers such as Tabula Rasa, NZB Finder, Miatrix, and DrunkenSlug (most allowing for 5 free downloads a day), Real-Debrid + Frugal Usenet is the same as ProtonVPN at $72 a year. Also note that Real-Debrid is able to cache torrents on request as long as someone's currently seeding them on public torrent trackers, and that with usenet to download a release that is X days old, you need a usenet provider with at least X days of retention.

iTunes is a double edged sword in that regard, given that while it initially innovated as a digital music distribution storefront, as more and more features were added to it, it started juggling too many tasks at once instead of continuing to innovate with just one.