Reddit’s decision about 3rd party apps and API changes actually made business sense. Not only was their content being pilfered on Reddit’s expense, but a decent portion of their user base were using 3rd party apps that didn’t collect as much data nor serve Reddit ads like the official app. At the expense of losing a decent portion of their community, moderators, and any goodwill their userbase had towards them, Reddit now has all their mobile users on a single, add ridden app that they own and can collect as much data as they want going forward as well as ensures that they get paid for AI API usage

They’ve beefed with a few other instances they tried federating with too such as Lemmy.ee and lemmy.blahaj.zone. Their user base tends to be a bit more abrasive than most Lemmy instances, making federation controversial even among similarly minded instances such as lemmy.blahaj.zone

Noise cancelling headphones don’t work against babies. They are designed for cancelling ambient sound by playing frequencies to cancel out the noise, but can’t predict sudden noises like children crying very well. Earplugs or earbuds do a better job at drowning those out by plugging your ears from outside noises

They’re volunteers running the instance personally, not a corporation with a legal team who can advise them how to best handle piracy related communities without being sued. Especially since their instance has to cache content from instances they federate with, it’s hard to blame them for being overly cautious with piracy communities on instances out of their control to avoid being sued by litigation happy media corporations

You just need 3 largish televisions, a small TV or monitor for the top, and stuff to mount each screen in that configuration. Your PC doesn’t need to be that good unless you are doing something like gaming, just enough to run 4 1080p windows. Once you connect them, it’s fairly easy to adjust the configuration in Windows to extend and rotate the monitors to make the setup work. Depending on how you get the televisions (you can buy them used, flat screen 1080p TVs have been popular for a long time and are relatively affordable) and how you decide to mount them, you can build this setup for only a couple hundred

Ecosia is pretty good, they plant trees with the money they get from your searches

Yep, it’s literally just another Reddit. The main benefit is that it’s decentralized so it’s not under the control of a single corporation, but yeah, it’s mainly ex redditors on a service designed to be an alternative to Reddit

They’re going to start paying posters for highly awarded posts and comments, with people who receive the most getting a better rate. Reddit content bots are going to be profitable, and the entire site is going to be repost bots and AI generated content garbage soon enough

Google was only able to do that because XMPP’s userbase was practically nonexistent by the time they pulled the plug. Google Talk had become such a hegemon that the overwhelming majority of XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users. Google had the option to keep tying themselves to a protocol that they don’t own to support access to a very small amount of users or develop their own system that they could do whatever they want with. Lemmy and Mastodon do not have that issue. Regardless of what Facebook does with Threads, Mastodon has millions of users and Lemmy reached over 300k. The majority of their users are unlikely to migrate their accounts over just to sell their souls to the Zucc. There is enough activity on Lemmy and Mastodon that many Threads users may make seperate accounts here should Threads eventually defederate, while the users of Lemmy and Mastodon simply go back to an existence without Facebook’s meddling. There’s not a situation where Threads can destroy Lemmy or Mastodon like there was with XMPP