Welcome to the community. I hope you enjoy your time here, I know I have!

It's also about search engine indexing. It's happening slowly, but I've noticed Lemmy posts are finally beginning to show up in Google/Bing search results. As this trend improves, more people will stumble here by accident and then join out of curiosity.

I follow a similar philosophy, except I do downvote the mean but not rule breaking content. While it's not bad enough to justify removal, I do still want to discourage people being mean on this platform. For most disagreeable opinions, I'll either move on or reply with my point of view.

Humans are resistors. We just need to create a chain of people, and the more we add the more resistance the circuit will have too.

I wash my coat from time to time because I consider and have considered it to be part of my wardrobe. For my belt, I suppose I kinda just considered it as an accessory and it never occurred to me to clean it.

I have some clothes that fit well enough that I don't need a belt in order for them to stay up. I do use a belt for some of my clothes though.

Agreed. I'm under no delusions, when I pirate media I'm stealing. I personally don't believe it's immoral to steal from super corporations, especially considering how much they steal from us, but some people disagree and with these types of moral arguments there isn't a clear right answer. Even still, I think the majority of pirates are willing to pay for software or media when the service is priced well and more convenient than piracy.

If they do both-ways federation (I've heard rumors of it being one-way only) it should theoretically be both Lemmy and Mastodon, but it will work better with Mastodon because they're both for the same purpose (i.e. Twitter-like apps).

Theoretically, something like c/deliciousfood or c/foodpics. I don't have strong feelings on this issue, but there are alternative names that would work.

I've heard before that in the early days of Reddit u/spez had hundreds of alts he would use to reply to posts to make Reddit seem more popular. I wonder if he occasionally resurrects them to support political arguments he likes or to defend Reddit admins.

Yeah, I think this is done to provide the illusion of choice. The rate limits are high enough to allow personal emails through, but for any mass emails or corporate emails this forces you to use Google. Unfortunately a standard corporate strategy, it's why corporate office suites are so generic and tend to be from one of the big companies.

Reddit isn't going to win or lose, it already lost. It has never been profitable, has been outcompeted by Instagram and TikTok, and was already showing signs of failure. The one thing that they had going for them was their relationship with the community, and they couldn't even maintain that. At this point Reddit is a sinking ship, average people will move on to the next big thing and the power users will move to other places they can get their content seen, and Reddit may not be in the grave but they've already dug it and they are on the edge.