I can only imagine the feeling of having such a weight lifted off your shoulders and conscience. It must feel almost like a fresh start, because in a way it is. Or at least that’s how it sounds to me, being able to progress in a meaningful way without such major hindrances.

I’m glad to hear you got to see such a favourable outcome after such a long and turbulent period, and I’m genuinely happy for you and your church, that you get to make progress in making your community better for everyone. It sounds like you all have the best of things to look forward to already, but I wish you all the best anyway.

Good news has been a bit hard to come by lately, so it’s extraordinarily refreshing to hear some for a change. So cheers, and thanks again for sharing.

Wow. Yeah that sounds like a rough ride, I’m sorry you and so many others were dragged through the coals like that for so long. It sounds like things were at a point where a split like that was probably necessary unfortunately, maybe even entirely unavoidable from the sound of it.

Thanks for sharing your experience, and congratulations on a more unified (and moral) stance on these issues. I hope your church can finally and more easily move forward without the weight of the interference, pressure, and influence these fringe actors had been exercising in the past several years.

Good on you. It’s always refreshing to hear from Christian folks who have a strong enough moral compass to steer away from (let alone actively support direct opponents of) some of the more zealous or bigoted views which unfortunately seem to be growing stronger in the Christian community as of late.

I say this from the outside looking in, as I’ve never been associated with any church myself, so this viewpoint of mine may just be the result of an increasingly active vocal minority.

But I’m very curious to hear your experience as someone within the community; have you yourself seen growth in these types of zealous or bigoted views in the past several years within the Christian Community? Things like stronger, more vocal, or even unwavering support of anti-abortion or anti-LGBTQ laws/practices?

Please tell me that’s not the real price for what is essentially a few small blades in a cup attached to an electric motor

God I miss Tidal. Their suggestions were so far above and beyond everything else I’ve tried, I just wish it was managed and maintained competently. Their Android and desktop apps are (were? It’s been a while) so chock-full of playback bugs and annoying little quirks, and their customer support is probably not even legally considered customer support at all, considering the fact that it seems to consist entirely of a single email bot that receives support tickets, waits 3 weeks, then closes that ticket.

I was particularly irritated with the fact that albums would become “unavailable” so incredibly often, while a new, identical version of the album was made available, for no apparent reason. Since these replacement albums weren’t automatically migrated into my library, I would have to remove and and re-add the albums individually in order to play them from my library, then update all my playlist containing any songs from that “disabled” version of the album by removing and re-adding each individual song. That shit got old, FAST.

I eventually had to swap to Spotify because of an absolutely baffling bug that acted like a virus and slowly “ate” my library (more info below if anyone’s curious), and Spotify’s music suggestions are just nothing short of horrendous.

My “discover weekly” last week for example was made up of approximately 60% songs either already in my library, or songs that I’ve listened to before and not liked much from artists in my library, plus 7 (!!) 20-30+ minute soundscapes, something I have NEVER listened to before, as well as 2 new Ariana Grande singles (sponsored? I’ve had to block her, those singles were popping up everywhere), and a few songs from totally out-there genres, including a country rap song which just so happens to be the one and only song I’ve ever actually disliked back before Spotify removed and re-introduced that feature, some background music from a random indie game’s soundtrack which was mostly just cave noises, a jazz-fusion album’s interlude, and something that I can only describe as bubblegum cyberpunk black glitch-metal dancecore. A positively psychotic selection of music.

Granted, that was the worst discover weekly I think I’ve ever had, but I still just wish that tidal worked for me, because I’ve never discovered more great music from any other platform’s suggestion algorithm, and nothing since has even come close.

About the weird bug if anyone’s curious:

The bug was pretty fucked up in that it behaved basically like a virus. At random points while listening, Tidal would fail to play a song at master quality, automatically downgrade playback by one level, then apply that inability to play master-quality permanently to each subsequent song I played in that session. These songs were now “infected”. Replaying these songs at a later date would further degrade the playback quality by an additional level, and also add a delay of ~20 seconds per playback quality level it had been downgraded to, as well as infecting any other songs I played after. When a song reached 96kbps (or 160? Whatever the lowest is, I forget) and could not degrade any more, it would either play at minimum quality after a ~60 second delay (which was unskippable because Tidal was unresponsive to playing a new song during the delay), or just fail to play entirely while loading infinitely, absolutely chugging my battery-life, and overheating my phone. I could only stop it by force-closing the app, which would crash my phone, every single time. There was about a 20% chance for one of these songs to fail playback, but if it did play, that chance to fail playback was now applied to each subsequent song played, no matter the song’s “infection level”. Though that at least didn’t seem to be permanently applied like the quality degradation, but I don’t know for sure.

The weirdest part is that the bug would persist, spread, and behave exactly the same way on an old phone that had never had tidal installed before, and also with the desktop app (though without the overheating, and it would throw and error message after some time if a song failed to play). So the bug seemed somehow account-bound?

I researched unsuccessfully for weeks looking for a fix, and I tried everything I could to fix it aside from making a new tidal account, because it was a lot of trouble to migrat. And support… Well, Tidal support apparently just doesn’t exist. I had sent 3 separate support tickets, all of which went unanswered, then marked as “resolved” and closed 2-3 weeks later. Only the 2nd ticket got an automated “thanks for your ticket, staff will help soon” response before being marked resolved and closed.

Eventually, so much of my library became infected (as well as a ton of random songs that would commonly end up playing after albums) that my ability to both listen to the music I loved and discover new music in the styles/genres I loved was crippled. Which obviously rendered the entire platform effectively useless. So after being repeatedly ignored by support with no explanation, and after several software updates that didn’t fix the problem while I was trying to contact support, or even just report the bug… I had to give up and switch to Spotify.

It’s unfortunate how often it is that the best solution is to combine the powers of 2 sites that have been (not so) recently dipping their toes into the “detestable corporations” side of things.

I share the same sentiment, but the problem is finding a better “elsewhere”.

Google search used to be so far beyond the capabilities of all other search engines, but lately it’s been closing that gap from the top down. Even in its enshittified state, it still outperforms the other search engines out there more consistently, albeit just barely.

That’s my experience anyway, I would love to be introduced to something better if anyone happens to have suggestions!

I still remember the first phishing website I ever accidentally visited, rnyspace.com

Personally, I think “lemming” is infinitely better than “fedditor”.