Just to toss my feedback in the ring: I listen to a podcast themed around a local sports team on Spotify, and I often download them to my phone locally because I’m old and still have the habits of being on a limited data plan even though I’ve had unlimited for years.

I noticed the ads (pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll) and was surprised because a lot of them tend to be local ads for various cities across the US. HVAC services in Chicago, lawyers in Houston, etc. None for the city where the podcasters live, most of their audience lives, or the spots team is based.

I don’t always download the episodes to listen, only if I know I’m going to be out , or if I’m mowing the lawn and might occasionally stretch my wifi range. I haven’t tested fully, but it seems as though the ads only get baked into the audio upon download.

I also noticdd a few months ago that downloading a podcast I was partway through resets my progress, which has been incredibly annoying. If the ads are inserted at the time of download, that would make sense because the length of the audio would change.

This isn’t censoring culture. This is a streaming platform focusing on streaming and giving up on trying to be more than that.

The communities still exist and will find a new platform. Just over a year ago there was a sizeable chunk of Redditors that came to Lemmy. It’s happened time after time when a platform goes down. Communities are much more than just the platform they are on.

And… Why is that?

Anime can be found on tons of streaming services that don’t have comments, like Netflix.

Anime in particular is pretty famous for having its own communities and niche spaces on the internet. If anything, Crunchyroll’s comments section seems to me like it’s unnecessarily fracturing those communities based on who watches on Crunchyroll vs other methods.

There are costs to maintain and moderate communities. It seems to me like that’s adding a good bit of cost to Crunchyroll’s business model in exchange a vlrelatively small value provided to a small percentage of their customers. Whereas with dedicated social media platforms, the business model revolves around and only attracts individuals who highly valued that community. With a smaller community like that, it’s easier to rely on volunteer mods (like most of Lemmy) or a bit of ad revenue.

Good. Not every website needs to be a social media platform too. There’s already plenty of communities on the Internet to discuss anime.

Any word on a Citra replacement? I remember a while back I tried to look for an alternative just for compatibility for certain games and I couldn’t find much. It seemed like Citra was the only good option for actually playing games. When you add in that the 3DS is no longer sold or supported, plus the hardware gimmicks that led to most games being exclusive to that platform, and also the sheer discomfort my adult hands experience trying to hold such a small device, I’d really much rather play those games on the Deck or with a controller.

The Switch is still young. It’s Nintendo’s active console so they’re dedicating more security and legal resources to protecting it, but I’m sure that will be reduced after the Switch 2 launches. RyuJinx is still a solid option, and when you add these various forks I’m sure emulation will be in a good spot in time.

Basically just install it on all 3 devices, then identify which folders need to sync. And back up any saves you care about first, just in case.

First I set up the Shield. I think I just found it on the play store. Then set up each folder I wanted. SyncThing gives each shared folder a unique code, so when setting up folders on other devices you just enter that to let SyncThing know those 2 folders should sync. The Shield might not be ideal: a Raspberry Pi or something might be easier to work with than Android TV, but it still works.

On the Deck, you can just go to Desktop mode and find Syncthing in the repository. You don’t need to do any major changes like the Decoy loader or anything, but if I remember correctly it’s handy to have FlatSeal as well to grant the various programs permissions to each other’s folders. I also installed SyncThing GTK and added that as a non-Steam game, so even in Gaming mode I can access a GUI for it. I think that also made it easy to set up SyncThing to automatically start.

From there I chose to make a new directory, set that folder up on SyncThing, and then re-configured my emulators to save there. Retroarch, Dolphin, PCSX2. They all have different settings for it: PCSX2 sets up virtual Memory Cards, for example.

On Windows, I just followed the instructions to install SyncThing, then I also installed SyncThingy, which makes SyncThing run on startup. On a full desktop I found it easier to just use the existing folders for each program rather than create new ones and move them around.

Fantastic application. I use it to sync my retro game saves: retroarch, dolphin, PCSX2, etc. Got it on the Steam Deck and Windows Desktop. They all sync with the NVIDIA Shield, which is always on. Works fantastically well and doesn’t seem to noticably impact the Deck’s battery life.