When you can’t trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you’re seeing are real, you’ve lost the foundation a community platform is built on.

Reddit and Twitter are filled to the brim with spambots and remain successful. The lack of distinction between real and fake content serves to attract marketers and propagandists to such platforms, with most users remaining due to the network effect. With its venture capitalist funding, Digg would be just as willing to benefit from spam if it held market dominance, and thus only distributed Fediverse platforms like Lemmy or Mastodon are viable solutions.

Penalties that are lower than profits encourage companies to rob consumers again in the future.

Gr0lum shouldn’t have revealed the IP addresses of YGG moderators and could have handled aspects of the leak better, but the YGG admin’s rebuttal post is undermined by disgusting transphobia:

The rules of the competing tracker, set up by these same individuals, clearly show their true colors: anyone who doesn’t buy into their woke ideological vision isn’t welcome. “LGBTQI+ phobias” are placed on the same level as fascism or racism, and any “debate” on the subject is purely and simply forbidden. In other words, if you’re not comfortable with the idea of dad putting on mom’s wig, you’re not welcome on their platform.

At least with Proton VPN, it seems that some VPN servers are blocked while others aren’t. Trying with one server worked, while another resulted in a 403 Forbidden error.

Seems like the solution is to just change VPN servers until you find one with an IP that isn’t blocked. Otherwise, the Torrentio configuration page shows the following message, and Torrentio itself can’t be used in Stremio:

If you use Torrentio with Stremio, Torrentio blocks VPNs, though I don’t know why a VPN block would be impacting one platform but not another.

Windows Central shouldn’t be parroting the U.S. government in mislabeling the Department of Defense.

Not sure how; it’s also not by defederation date, otherwise feddit.org would be at or near the bottom of the list for dbzer0.

The best tool I know of is the Federation Checker, but something like it should definitely should be built into clients.

Notably, Beehaw is defederated from .world and sh.itjust.works, while dbzer0, quokk.au, and anarchist.nexus are defederated from feddit.org.

Agreed; Discord is trying to lull people into a false sense of security as a means of convincing them to stay, in the same manner that Reddit gave limited API access to apps like RedReader to stem the tide of users leaving for platforms like Lemmy.

Beyond age verification, if Discord is scanning a user’s messaging history to determine what their age is, one can only imagine all the other data valuable to data brokers that they are extracting from it too.

“Too late” isn’t even relevant anyway, they’re still doing it, so everyone should still be leaving.