The Economist is also known for attempts at “wit” in some of their headlines. The title is surely riding the line of satire intentionally.

Yeah. I hate Nancy Pelosi. I hate Trump MORE, but I hate him more than just about anyone. Pelosi is still a garbage person.

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.

That’s kind of the inverse of “confidence”, which is a requested feature for comment sort.

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.

What I do not understand about this take is that they can already collect all of this data, today. They don’t need to federate with the rest of the Fediverse to scrape basically all of the data they want. The only problematic thing they’d need an instance for is linking votes to users - which is something they could do just by spinning up a Lemmy instance. And they probably shouldn’t be able to, Lemmy should try to figure out a way to anonymize votes.

Threads joining the Fediverse does not significantly increase their ability to collect data about existing Fediverse denizens.

They already can access all if your data in the fediverse. They don’t need their own platform to do that.

Lemmy doesn’t support LDAP, OIDC, or anything like them yet, so at least as far as that goes sign-in can’t be easily unified.

There are tracking issues though:

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/489
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1241
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1368
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2930

That’s fucking ridiculous. Maybe we should all start posting this meme and get ourselves banned.

Reach out to The Verge, they’ve been covering the Reddit debacle pretty well and I bet they’d love to hear from you.

Slashdot has had that (but for upvotes) for like 20 years, haha. It’s…mildly useful.

The Lemmy team runs several test instances with the new versions, you may want to test against those in the future. The one I remember off the top of my head is https://enterprise.lemmy.ml/

Edit: See the announcement post for the others.

Fuck, I just lost.