It's unfortunate, but it's kinda understandable why they chose to do so. The admins are just a bunch of regular people, they may not have the financial security to risk the legal issues that could come from having any sort of piracy related content.

I guess I'll just be using my alt acc for piracy stuff.

The fact that there was no announcement before the banning of the communities is not great, but good on you for acknowledging that mistake.

It's unfortunate that this action had to be done, but it's also understandable. It's not about what's right or wrong, and it's not even about whether there actually is any illegal content in these communities. It's about the fact that the Big Entertainment Companies don't care about the difference and see it ALL as bad, irregardless of whether it actually is illegal or not. If the admin team had a legal team and the financial security to fight back, then it wouldn't be as much of an issue. But they're not, they're just a bunch of regular folks, so they're being cautious and trying to pre-emptively prevent these problems from coming up, especially as Lemmy continues to grow every day.

The beauty of the Fediverse is that you can always switch instances or make an alt account.

It's nice that they still have hope and still love their community enough to want to attempt to seek some sort of resolution, but imo reddit the company is never going to budge now. It's personal for spez now, and the company is simply going to barrel on and ignore all these letters and everything. They're committed to their stance now, and they're going to simply wait it out, until all the opposing people have left/been kicked out and all that is left of reddit the community are those who either still support them or who don't care. It's sad, but imo the reddit as we knew it is dead, and it's time to accept that and move on.

Thank you for all your work. It sucks that there are people who would do shit like this. Please don't forget to take care of yourselves as well.

It's just sad to see how far reddit has fallen.

Just seeing the list of privacy data collected is enough to make me baulk. I barely ever use Facebook or Twitter as is, I'm not touching that shit with a 10ft pole.

Recommendations and reviews about everything under the sun from actual users and not sponsored ad reviews.

so many have gone dark already, this is impressive.

Yeah it's sad to see how reddit has fallen, but oh well. You either die a hero, or you live to see yourself become the villain.

Article is very biased towards Reddit the Company, and actively paints the protesting mods as being the sole instigators of the protest, calling them "super mods" which has a negative connotation, and makes no mention of the fact that many users and communities are also in support of said protest. It also paints the protesters as immature by positing the "question" of will the community "let [reddit] grow up", implying that the protesters are stifling the growth of reddit. It is very sympathetic towards spez and calls the reddit community "rambunctious", as if the reddit community are children, and only quotes negative examples of notable things the reddit community has achieved. It writes of the protests as if it's a child's temper tantrum that will go away with time.

The article paints the death of the Apollo app as the main reason for the protest, other than the one line of "Old-timers were also angry that the heady days of Reddit’s anticapitalist roots seemed to be officially over.", which is inaccurate. It makes no mention of the many other reasons the community is unhappy and protesting, which includes, among others:

• the lack of accessibility features and proper moderation tools in the official app,
• the perceived dishonesty on the part of Reddit the Company,
• and the loss of faith in Reddit the Company in general.

It also doesn't state the true reason why people were upset about the death of Apollo and other 3PAs, which is that those apps had the accessibility features and moderation tools that the official reddit app should have had but doesn't, and the loss of these 3PAs means that the already back-breaking job of moderation is only going to get harder. It makes no mention of the fact that the unhappiness over the API pricing was due to the ridiculous price and the short time frame, instead painting these "apps like Apollo" as leeches that "send no money back to the company".

tldr: article is very biased toward spez, making him seem like a sympathetic parent trying to control his rebellious children, generalising all protesting mods as bad "super mods", and does not mention the real issues of the protest.

It'll take some time to get used to this and learn how to properly use this, but I'm happy to have this community. :)

My goto for offline gaming is usually emulation, typically pokemon. But I can also recommend the Bart Bonte puzzle games, Vampire Survivor and Shattered Pixel Dungeon.

I'm definitely spending more time on lemmy than reddit nowadays. Reddit still has too many great resources and info to abandon completely, but with more time to grow, hopefully lemmy will eventually replace reddit for me.

Recommendations and reviews about everything under the sun from actual users and not sponsored ad reviews.

I think that the average person is just ignorant about the issues regarding privacy, or doesn't have the time and energy to find out/care about it. Big societal issues such as privacy require some digging into to find information on, and they require some (a lot of) thinking to fully understand the problems and the consequences of these issues. A lot of people are already struggling to deal with their daily lives. Big issues like internet privacy and data collection are too big and too distant for them to care about, and the short-term convenience gained from giving in is too good. It's currently quite a hassle for the average layman to learn how to use and implement the tools to protect your privacy (not helped by the big businesses deliberately making things difficult).

I really hope that they do, Fandom is annoying as heck to use with the constant advertising and unnecessary sidebar that pops up a big window on mouseover etc. In fact, I hope all fandom wikis leave Fandom and migrate elsewhere.

Not just with reading, personally I have this problem with hearing, more so than with reading. If I'm not actively concentrating, stuff really just goes in one ear and out the other, bypassing the brain competely. This is why I can't multitask while listening to podcasts or audiobooks, because it just becomes white noise.

Happy new year to all the admins, mods and everyone! Hope we all have a fruitful 2024 ahead!

What they need isn't positivity, what they need is a tutorial. Right now, the barriers of entry for lemmy (and kbin and mastodon and other fediverse places) are too high for the common layman. They just want something that they can throw their names in and it just works. They don't want to know about federation and instances and how the fediverse works. They don't want to have to research the differences between instances and pick one that seems best for them, they are just going to pick a random one and expect it to see everything.

I want to share my first experience with the Fediverse. During the Twitter Exodus, I heard about Mastodon and, being curious, decided to give it a go. I installed the Mastodon app and tried to sign up, and I had no idea what the Fediverse is or what these instances are. I was expecting a simple signup process like Twitter. I was confused through the signup process, wondering why do I need to "pick an instance", what's the difference, what am I doing. Even after I picked an instance and got in, I had no clue how to find people to follow, how to see everybody's posts (didn't help that I barely used Twitter in the first place and thus was unfamiliar with this sort of place), why is my feed full of devs and programmers (I accidentally picked a tech industry themed instance randomly). It took too much time and effort to learn (and I wasn't committed or interested enough), so I eventually abandoned it.

Nowadays, I have a much better understanding of all this, lemmy is more comfortable for me, and thus I am having a much better experience. But for many who have no experience with the Fediverse, all of this is a lot, and it may be too much effort for them to dig in and learn how all this works. The general UX of lemmy needs to be streamlined and made, if not easier, then more approchable. Only then will more and more people be willing to join and participate in the Fediverse.

Major Tech Companies: If it ain't broke, we'll break it, then provide the solution for a price.