You are underestimating how much bulshit people are willing to put up just to not have to make any change.

I see people going "this is what you get for buying digital", and that's what they are not seeing. This is not about digital being more unreliable than physical. This is an attack at the concept of customer ownership itself.

Our society is long overdue giving con men the ass kicking they deserve.

VLC is just a media player. It isn't on them if anyone is using it to watch or listen pirated content just as much as it isn't on Adobe or Microsoft if people use them to read pirated books. They aren't the one hosting or distributing the pirated content

Really, I get an off feeling just by trying to parse out what is your reasoning here. Did we get to a point that technology is so corporately-controlled that the idea of a program can freely open files of a certain type is inherently subversive, as opposed to a service or storefront where everything is tied to some corporately-owned licenses?

But I shouldn't be alarmist and make too many assumptions. What is the "legal gray area risk" that you mean here?

Right-wingers only seem to care about free speech when it applies to themselves. Anyone else and they'll get talking of "defeating the woke mind virus" or whatever ridiculous way they decide to demonize others.

Reminds me of that Sartre quote

The Internet Archive has special status that gives it protections. What might kill it is the erosion of support for public libraries and such. The advancement of media companies' attempt to have absolute control over everything they release, by binding it into their own services.

I get wanting to keep porn away from children, but on the flipside I don't trust governments with a history of criminalizing homosexuality with my porn history. Looking up, it seems that these states even kept laws against sodomy in their books.

I was fine with ads a couple years ago, but the number, length and frequency of them keeps ramping up. This wouldn't need to be such a struggle if they just were reasonable about it.

Honestly at this point I feel worse for the guy who made the threat than anyone else. Can you imagine what is like working with those sort of bosses with such exploitative tendencies and an utter disregard for an entire industry? They get to ruin countless lives but if anyone gets mad that's the unacceptable one who is punished.

You think being inevitably forced to see every bit of harassment and spam is going to make that platform more popular and financially viable? Nah, if anything this is free advertising for Mastodon.

Servers with ANY content not suitable for 10 year olds are now prohibited

This is just ridiculous. What makes them think they get to decide what grown-ass adults do in their own private servers?

They are about a decade too late to child-proof Minecraft. A lot of the children they might even claimed to want to protect are adults by now.

Well that sounds terrible. At least with the blue logo you can just hide or block their posts to get to the organic engagement.