Asking genuinely: do people still use Mastodon? It boomed briefly when Musky took twitter but for whatever reason, people decided to go to the data harvesting, ad filled blue sky. I never got either of them but have been recently thinking of mastodon but assumed people don’t still use it.
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Wasn't aware that this is a 4K video and my lemmy UI doesn't have option to play at lower scale (not sure if lemmy itself has this feature). Accidentally crashed my phone lol
failed to load media 🥲
The full length video (4:20 one) appears to be broken on their website. Anyone got a copy?
The rest load fine (30 and 15s ones).
I mean the whole blog post is just advertising disguised as advocacies really though, would be good if there was something like this made by people without an ulterior motive
Especially as the UK porn ban has been a HUGE boon to those VPN providers, suddenly gaining literally millions of customers
Edit: Honestly, I think all those VPNs are secretly lobbying in favor of these kind of stupid laws cause those laws are good for their bottom line
I am conflicted. A company has made me want to watch an ad and I enjoyed it.
Its weird. It wouldn't be out of place as a pre-roll ad in a theater IMO. It gets the point across without narration in a horribly corporate voiceover OR obnoxious music.
At its core, I don't mind if someone wants to let me know about their product. Unfortunately we're in an age where it's absolutely in our faces all the time and pushed with the most brain-rotting algorithms, and they're absolutely horrendous. Every once in a while though I'll still find ads that I enjoy, mainly YouTube creators who don't just read scripts, but put in effort to make something worth watching.
I'll always point to 'TomSka and Friends' (TomSka being the creator of the ASDFmovie series) as being decent ads; each one is a full skit and I actually enjoy those ads because they put in the effort.
At one point in time advertisements were in dedicated sections of newspapers, magazines, posted in business windows and maaaaybe sent out in mailors. And that was about it. If you didn't want to be advertised to you didn't read the ads. When TV broadcasts first started there was an dilemma over whether people would tolerate TV commercial breaks, and whether they were even ethical since you couldn't just turn the page if you didn't want to read the ad. We're light-years beyond that mindset and level of consumer respect now. Ads that try to appear to be anything but ads, individually targeted ads, unskippable ads on CPR instructional videos, ads in search results, ads on floating billboards among the beach, ads on your refrigerator, ads on your personal tablet or laptop, ads on the damn gas pump... it's fucking dystopian.
unskippable ads on CPR instructional videos
Funnily enough, this is an actual example they use in one of their ad skits!
Video is time-stamped at the ad, but the whole video is pretty great (if it happens to be your type of humor)
I swore if this future came to pass, I'd gouge my eyes out with a spoon. Currently, I'm looking over at the kitchen drawer ...
in NZ we used to have an awards show for the best tv ads 😅
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6PqLnqSbeA
best one I remember:
I never would have expected to see a Dude Where's My Car reference in 2026.
I dunno, it tracks to me. Someone sees Dude Where's My Car in theaters in 2000 at the age of 16. In 2026 they're 42 and have been working at an ad company for 15 years.
That’s the part that blew my mind. I watched that movie rented on VHS and remember exactly 2 things; the referenced scene and DUDE! What does mine say? SWEET! What does mine say? DUDE!…
On what grounds was it banned?

Here’s some irony

Yep. Should have just linked to this one, which works:
https://media.mullvad.net/andthen/30s/Mullvad_AND_THEN_30s_US_ProRes422_Webmix_4K.mov
First mistake was using a Twitter (twimg) link.
I intentionally used Twitter/X video link instead of Mullvad website video link because Mullvad website is blocked in a good number of countries.
On the other hand, Twitter is one of the top 10 websites globally. Which means it's guaranteed to work in most countries.
Yeah, but it's still Twitter and backed by a fascist POS. Gross.
Fucks my phone up. Don't see video, hear audio, have to kill browser.
I don't think X works as well or as widely as you may think.
Why not just use a video hosting website then? Why go out of your way to use one of the most hated websites on lemmy?
That video was made before the UK decision. It is a general critique of all surveillance laws, globally
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