Right-wingers only seem to care about free speech when it applies to themselves. Anyone else and they'll get talking of "defeating the woke mind virus" or whatever ridiculous way they decide to demonize others.

Reminds me of that Sartre quote

This is why I say, with not a single drop of irony, that piracy is a public service.

VLC is just a media player. It isn't on them if anyone is using it to watch or listen pirated content just as much as it isn't on Adobe or Microsoft if people use them to read pirated books. They aren't the one hosting or distributing the pirated content

Really, I get an off feeling just by trying to parse out what is your reasoning here. Did we get to a point that technology is so corporately-controlled that the idea of a program can freely open files of a certain type is inherently subversive, as opposed to a service or storefront where everything is tied to some corporately-owned licenses?

But I shouldn't be alarmist and make too many assumptions. What is the "legal gray area risk" that you mean here?

Servers with ANY content not suitable for 10 year olds are now prohibited

This is just ridiculous. What makes them think they get to decide what grown-ass adults do in their own private servers?

They are about a decade too late to child-proof Minecraft. A lot of the children they might even claimed to want to protect are adults by now.

Our society is long overdue giving con men the ass kicking they deserve.

I get wanting to keep porn away from children, but on the flipside I don't trust governments with a history of criminalizing homosexuality with my porn history. Looking up, it seems that these states even kept laws against sodomy in their books.

Honestly at this point I feel worse for the guy who made the threat than anyone else. Can you imagine what is like working with those sort of bosses with such exploitative tendencies and an utter disregard for an entire industry? They get to ruin countless lives but if anyone gets mad that's the unacceptable one who is punished.

The whole framing that Spez is bringing maturity is incredibly disingenuous. The "mature" approach is to impose change with no attempt at reaching consensus over a community-driven platform?

What is the mature part of expecting volunteers to keep performing free work as they are actively antagonized? Is he going to pay all moderators and dissatisfied content creators? I don't think so.

They are just using "mature" as codeword for monetized. Or maybe in that classist sense of "learn to submit to your betters, peons".

Fee speech, pay $8/mo to post hate speech at your leisure.

You think being inevitably forced to see every bit of harassment and spam is going to make that platform more popular and financially viable? Nah, if anything this is free advertising for Mastodon.

Well that sounds terrible. At least with the blue logo you can just hide or block their posts to get to the organic engagement.

Just once I would love to open one of these threads without seeing people shitting... on Linux.

Linux is not even the one doing anything wrong but people gotta rag on whoever recommends it as an alternative. This is getting more annoying than however annoying they say Linux users are.

edit: Just to make clear because some folks aren't getting it, this is not an invitation to argue about how you feel about Linux and Linux users. I. don't. fucking. care. I don't even use Linux. Take it to someone who cares.

The Internet Archive has special status that gives it protections. What might kill it is the erosion of support for public libraries and such. The advancement of media companies' attempt to have absolute control over everything they release, by binding it into their own services.

I see people going "this is what you get for buying digital", and that's what they are not seeing. This is not about digital being more unreliable than physical. This is an attack at the concept of customer ownership itself.

You are underestimating how much bulshit people are willing to put up just to not have to make any change.

I was fine with ads a couple years ago, but the number, length and frequency of them keeps ramping up. This wouldn't need to be such a struggle if they just were reasonable about it.

I didn't know what this was about. I found this that can serve as context for others unaware: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/26/1159580425/newspapers-have-dropped-the-dilbert-comic-strip-after-a-racist-rant-by-its-creat

[...] Adams urged white people "to get the hell away from Black people" during a racist rant on his online video program last week, during which he labeled Black people a "hate group."

On his video show last week, the 65 year old said he had been identifying as Black "because I like to be on the winning team," and that he used to help the Black community. Adams said the results of the Rasmussen poll changed his mind.

"It turns out that nearly half of that team doesn't think I'm okay to be white," he said, adding that he would re-identify as white. "I'm going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off," he said. "I get called a racist. That's the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you're white. It's over. Don't even think it's worth trying."

This is not the first time Adams' strip has been dropped. Last year, The San Francisco Chronicle and 76 other newspapers published by Lee Enterprises reportedly dropped Dilbert after Adams introduced his first Black character. Quinn noted that the move was "apparently to poke fun at 'woke' culture and the LGBTQ community."

This is a distinction that some defenders miss. A lot of people who use ad-blockers would be fine with ads if they were restrained and not too obtrusive. But the amount and frequency of ads only seem to increase. Something that would be difficult to justify, because time does not suffer inflation.

We went from 1 skippable 5 second ad per video to multiple ads every 10 minutes or so, sometimes even unskippable 15+ second ads or even more ads in a row. When is it going to be enough? Are we supposed to take them on their word that this is necessary, simply assuming that they need it because they don't even share financial numbers? Is our only other option to pay up, once again, the amount that they decided is a fair compensation and also keep increasing?

Seems that at the very least some way for the users to negotiate what they believe is fair is lacking in this matter. On the lack of that, no wonder some people just decide they refuse to be squeezed forever.

It's a matter of self-preservation to get away from Unity as soon as possible at this point.

There used to be laws against this shit.