I think projectors are great. In fact, I currently have one. But there are lots of trade offs. They’re big and take up lots of space, especially the good ones. Placement can be awkward even if you get a short throw, unless you ceiling mount, which isn’t always practical. Relatedly, it can be a pain to hook up to sound because the projector is in the back while you need sound from the front. Image quality can be decent but is still way worse than pretty much all modern TVs. (I hear laser projectors kinda fix this but they’re even more expensive.) It doesn’t turn on instantly; there’s typically a significant warm up period for the lamp. Some units have a noisy fan because the lamp produces a lot of heat. You need a large clear wall space or a rollable screen. I think there’s a reason why projectors are typically in movie rooms and not for more casual spaces.

All this to say, projectors are great but not for all contexts. I wish the decision to get a projector and the decision to get a privacy respecting device were two completely unrelated decisions.

I thought PC monitors would be higher priced than commercial displays, but I haven’t really looked into it. It sounds like I should get a pihole either way.

It didn’t cross my mind that I could run Linux on a tv. (I figured, however, that the pre-installed software is built on Linux.) Are you talking about something like LinuxTV.org

Wow that’s another level of deceptive. Do you know if the major brands like Samsung, LG, and Sony do things like that? Or are they all equally shitty at this point?

I don’t understand these “That’s just how the world is. Shame on you for discussing it” comments. I think it is very much worth discussing this, even if the conclusion of the discussion is that it’s not worth changing after all.

You point out similar dynamics on Reddit, but it’s obviously not exactly the same. The design of Reddit is such that there is a much stronger tendency for main communities to arise. By contrast, lots of smaller communities on Lemmy look like ghost towns, where they would be much healthier if they combined numbers. “You’re free to do whatever” doesn’t address the systemic issue.

That said, I don’t think this is obvious either way. There are tons of benefits to the current system too. That’s why it’s worth coming back to this topic every once in a while. If these sorts of nitty gritty design discussions bore you, why are you on this community?