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Ecosystems are either too fragmented or too monopolistic.

In this case, it's actually both at the same time! No, for real, that's why it sucks so bad, both of those things are simultaneously problems with the streaming service market.

Another poster in this thread has already posted my personal preferred solution, which is to do the same thing we did to movie studios and movie theater ownership for many decades, ending only a few years ago: ban combined ownership of both production and distribution.

Thanks to Jellyfin + Infuse (on AppleTV), even family and visitors have no trouble using my "streaming service". And I can reach it on the road with TailScale. Takes me laughably little time per year to manage (maybe an hour in a normal year, perhaps two or three relatively "hands on" hours in a year I modify the zfs disk pool in some way)

My main motivation for having it is easy access to several things that can't be had legally at all (the best very-close-to-opening-day Star Wars movies in the 4k77/4k80/4k83 series, or uncut Beavis and Butthead episodes, or Northern Exposure with the original music, to pick a few examples) but once you've got it, adding everything to the server is arguably less effort and lost time than using a half-dozen streaming services.

I'd much rather pay, I dunno, $50/month or something for a service that had everything on it, but that doesn't exist, so I have this instead. It's a ton better than a pile of streaming services that are still missing most stuff, plus force you to play the ridiculous "which one had this, again?" game.

Haha, this thread has prompted me to follow some of the discussion about stupid bullshit like requiring "user is present" attestation and banning passkey programs (LOL wut?) if they lie about it, or resistance to allowing exports and portability.

I'm now on team "I am outright anti-passkeys and hope they fail and everyone pushing them cries a whole lot about it and never gets over it".

My usernames and passwords auto-fill with faceID already. Lots of forms even (somehow?) auto-submit after that, don't even have to press a button.

I’ve just been operating under the assumption passkeys are gonna lock me out unrecoverably in some way at some point, and have been avoiding them for anything important while allowing them for low-value accounts so they’ll stop nagging me.

I hate that I can’t just put a value in a plain text file somewhere (encrypted, let’s say, to preempt the inevitable and low-value response) and rely on that to work when I need it on any device and interface that can accept keyboard input.

LLMs really shine at speeding up corporate bureaucratic busy-work and nonsense.

We’re in a golden era when same busy work has not yet expanded due to LLM influence. Let’s appreciate it while it lasts.

I don't see how it's not him, Whitman (the timing of his work is a strong point in his favor, being so concerned with the civil war and that apparently-neveaending struggle in America's metaphorical soul), or maybe Melville though I think he's the weakest of those three. Most other plausible answers are too late in the country's history to take that particular title, for one thing. Irving and Poe are early enough but I don't think either's even close to the combo of clout, staying-power, influence, quality, and breadth of coverage of, specifically, Americanness that one would expect for this (and I like both of them!).

I would agree with other posters that if we allow the search to stretch into the 20th century, odds are we'd end up with a filmmaker or songwriter, but I think we've got our all-around best options already, and they're all (basically) 19th century.

Which of the proposed answers in the linked article would you characterize as one or both of "inaccessible" and "politically charged"?

I think a couple are bad answers (Wilder? She's fine-ish, but America's Homer? Very, very, no) but can't figure out which ones might be striking you that way.