academician

I was on Reddit for 17 years. It was my home on the Internet. I used to go to Reddit meetup days and hang out with other Reddit nerds. It's natural for people to have sentimental feelings about something that's been such a big part of so many of our lives.

I haven't been back since the Lemmy exodus, except by accident a few times. But I miss what it was.

I agree with the mods' decision, because they have to CYA. Whether a law is right or not is immaterial, they need to protect themselves and Lemmy.world from being taken down by law enforcement, web hosts, or what have you. At the end of the day, "morality" (which we all disagree on) simply doesn't matter - but material consequences do.

However - piracy is not stealing. Stealing means depriving someone else of something. Cf, "You wouldn't download a car" - which was hysterical, because of course you would, if it was free and deprived no one of anything.

And is it morally wrong? You assert that like it's a fact, but obviously many people disagree. What formal system of ethics are you, personally, basing your morals on? Christ? I don't remember intellectual property mentioned in the Bible. Kant? Maybe - in a world with a categorical imperative to pirate, there might be less incentive to produce piratable content. But I'm not necessarily convinced, because stories, songs, and art all existed prior to the invention of copyright.

Piracy is just copying data around. The moral or ethical implications of that are a matter of personal belief and social norms, which have informed the creation of law (and vice versa). But the history of IP is a lot more complicated than simply "enforcing morality".

If copyright law had existed contemporaneously with the advent of the printing press,the dissemination of books to the masses would have been much slower and more expensive, and we would likely not have seen the huge jump in literacy across Europe at the time. Once copyrights (called "monopolies") started to be granted they were not used to protect authors, but were weaponized as tools of censorship, suppressing works seen as subversive. Additionally, they were often granted as privileges to the landed gentry and those in favor with the ruling elite, further consolidating power and control over information and knowledge.

Some people believe that piracy, especially of scientific studies and materials that subvert harmful power structures, is not only moral - but a positive good for society, by democratizing access to information. I think that's hard to argue with. Of course, not all piracy meets such lofty criteria, but I think it bears more examination than simply dismissing all piracy as "morally wrong".

What even is your point? Does one protester's desire for violence justify the Chinese government's violence?

Man...it's been years, so I don't remember, but honestly it felt like it at the time. Everyone hated their massive V4 redesign, so people just...left. The Reddit situation is different, because it only really affected third-party app users, not every single user of the site.

Edit: I looked it up, and yeah, there was a "quit Digg day" on August 30, 2010 when pretty much everybody just left for Reddit and didn't look back. It helped that people actively bombed Digg's front page with links to Reddit that day, letting people know where to go. Two days later Digg's CEO was ousted by the board, two months later they laid off 37% of their staff. They basically died overnight. That's not happening to Reddit.

It's worth noting that Reddit has been around a lot longer than Digg had at the time, and has way more traffic than Digg ever did. Unseating Reddit is going to be a lot harder than quitting Digg was.

17 years. Probably the only site other than Google I've visited almost every day since then. It's extremely depressing to lose Reddit after all that time. But I'm enjoying Lemmy, and hoping we can grow it Digg-exodus-style.

I've never heard about this drama, but I also intentionally didn't follow the game too closely so I can go into it relatively blind. This sounds strange to me, though.

As far as I'm concerned, there are many ways to play video games, and many ways to play D&D, and none of them are "wrong" (as long as they don't harm real life people in some way). If you want to minmax then go for it, that is a valid way to play.

As a "Johnny" in the MtG sense I like to play broken/unintuitive/combo type characters. Not necessarily minmaxing, since it's not just about efficiency, but...efficient creativity. So I'm looking for a build that's "fun" in an unusual way, viable, but not necessarily "optimal".

Before you're going to launch a tirade about the absolute necessity to be progressive diverse non-fascist

I'm going to regret asking this, but... What?

That's kind of the inverse of "confidence", which is a requested feature for comment sort.

Here's some of my favorites in Massachusetts:

Rail Trail Roasters in Maynard (very small)

Broadsheet in Cambridge

New discovery from the Berkshires (western Mass): No. Six Depot

Voyager (formally Wefwef) is doing this. You can favorite communities and it will push them to the top. It's been useful for monitoring smaller communities.

Embrace, extend, and extinguish (EEE) - The biggest concern I have with this is rather than people thinking of us as separate platforms, people will start to associate us as Threads. We basically become Threads but for nerds/the paranoid/weirdos to many people.

Isn't that already how people probably see Lemmy and Mastodon vs Reddit and Twitter/Threads, even without federation? How would federation change anything? If anything I think it would just make more people aware that Lemmy even exists.

Hey - thank you for this response, it's the first one I've seen that tried to take the question "How could they EEE?" seriously.

What I still don't really understand is - how is this different from just creating a better competitor, without the federation at all? If you're worried about people choosing a superior, shinier corporate product, then surely they'd do this even without federation. At least with federation, we're not excluded from the walled garden, and don't have to have an account on their platform to interact with users we know or like there.

I have a Facebook account because there are people in my life that I want to communicate with on there, and that is my only way of contacting them. If FB was a federated platform, then I wouldn't have to have that account to do that.

The only (EEE-related) risk I see is that if Threads federates, they could then choose to defederate one day. But that would just make them into a walled garden again, the situation we already have today.