You can escape the wildcards as an alternative.

While that’s true, unfortunately I think the “getting paid” part might be the difficult part.

It does mine.

In theory, Ross Scott is (or at least was) trying to get something done about this. https://youtu.be/tUAX0gnZ3Nw?si=acNlZLK8MRqKWwgh

That was a wonderful reference.

I believe that Reolink cameras plus an NVR allow, but don’t require, completely offline recording.

Because it’s so rarely an option.

I know the name, but essentially nothing else of him, and did not realize that this was him or a real ad. I thought it was a reference to the boneitis guy.

That said, thank you for indirectly explaining this to me.

Kind of reminds me of " A Man Called Ove" or, in movie form, “A Man Called Otto.”

Gotcha, thank you for the edification.

Sure, and that’s great for you! I am, honestly, envious.

However, you said “you could switch.” For many people, including me, we cannot switch while maintaining a reasonable connection. My options are my current ISP (really not too bad, for the first time in my life), an ISP that provides a maximum of 12Mbps, an ISP that still isn’t quite sure if it can provide service to me, or satellite (which is pretty awful for a variety of services I use regularly). Even discarding reasonable expectations, this is not a “dozen or so.”

While your proposal might be good for you and others in “socialist” Europe, many people (likely even outside of Europe and the USA) don’t have that option and it probably doesn’t help resolve the parent commenter’s complaint.

Edit: also, while the USA is behind Europe in many ways, I suspect this is not so much a Europe vs USA issue as a rural vs not issue.

Hugely location dependent.

I had a similar experience.

I’m using “Connect.” For every post I see, there’s both a “block this community” and “block this instance” option. After I started making use of these, my feed (while still limited) became much more palatable. Presumably other apps have similar functionality, but I cannot comment definitively.