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

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.

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 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.

That's a lovely house. Love the overgrowth-ness of all the ground floor plants and the plants on the roof.

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

Thanks for the resources. I've only just got into modded skyrim, and it's kind of a lot. Unfortunately I started with the mods in the in-game launcher, but now want to transition to using other modded launchers for more variety. I've poked around a bit, and I've ended up with quite a mess. 😅 Hopefully these can help me sort out my mess and get the mods up and running.

That's cool to see. Honestly, I haven't been to r/place at all, so I have no idea what's happening there at all. I was only there last year for Technoblade.

I made an alt on a smaller instance when all the trouble with lemmy.world was happening, and I was thinking of making the alt my main, but I'm too lazy to port all my subscribed communities over, so this is still where I'm gonna be. I still browse from my alt sometimes, because the feeds are different.

I'm having the same issue... might switch to an alt or something for now.

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.

Considering that this was/is the account that was compromised, I think it would be more reassuring if it was one of the other admins confirming that the situation has been resolved. Right now we have no proof that this isn't the hacker lying to cover up their misdeeds.

While I think that we should rightly be very wary of Threads/Meta, I do also think that it is still too early to judge. It's hard to accurately predict what will happen in the future given the relative youth of Lemmy and the Fediverse. (Admittedly, I'm also relatively new to the Fediverse, so what do I know?) Given Meta's track record, we should be very aware of the possible red flags and make plans for possible future malicious actions, but for now I'm okay with waiting and watching.

Shadow Hearts: Covenant. I haven't played it in years, so maybe it's just nostalgia, but I remembered that the story was interesting, and the ring combat mechanic was fun, and the music is good. I never played the 1st and 3rd Shadow Hearts tho, only the 2nd.

That's sad to hear, I had always been interested in the worldbuilding and the story, but just didn't have the time to get into in.

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 think where privacy minded people fail to understand is that for most people we are not committing crimes or shady shit online therefore why care? A lot of us understand that if you type anything in a computer it is assumed to be on the public record either easily found or through a few hoops to get it.

The issue isn't that people are trying to hide their crimes or their shady shit, it's that the information about ourselves that we did not post online/are only letting a select few know are being revealed to strangers without our consent. It's about the choice of who we are willing to reveal what to. Are you willing to let strangers know every aspect of your daily life? What you eat, when you sleep, when you poop, where you go, what you like to do etc. Because that's what companies want with data collection, to know every aspect of you, the good the bad the ugly, so that they can market your data to advertisers and constantly push their products to you. Taken to the futuristic extreme, they can and will push toilet paper products to you while you are on the toilet, or advertise gym services while you are eating dessert, or maybe even push sex products while you are in bed with your partner. It's this sort of future that many people are worried about and want to prevent from happening. (And this isn't even talking about what governments can do with this sort of data collection.)

People want the choice of being able to reveal select information to select people. That's what privacy is.

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.

Once I figured out the method, it was easier than expected. Got all the way to level 8, but man am I bad at riddles.

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.