lemmy.world has had a handful of back to back queerphobic trolls spamming hate across multiple groups and instances.
They would get banned and come right back.
The reason they were able to do that is because of the open signups on lemmy.world.
Beehaw is an instance that takes protecting their members as their highest goal. They value it significantly more than wide federation.
And so they blocked lemmy.world, as it was a source of bigotry towards their members, and there were no other moderation tools available to them to resolve the issue.
And these sorts of defederations may also serve as a "hey, do something about this" smack to the defederated instances. Provided that lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works don't actually want to have trolls like that among their users they could implement mechanisms to make it harder for them to sign up.
If someone wants to deliberately run a 4chan-like free-for-all instance, that's fine, but I expect nobody's going to want to federate with it.
Unity is a game engine used by a lot of developers, many of them indies. Some popular games that use Unity are Among Us, Cuphead, Cult of the Lamb, and Tunic. They recently made several changes to their TOS that has upset the gaming community.
Unity used to have a clause in the TOS stating:
“if the Updated Terms adversely impact your rights, you may elect to continue to use any current-year versions of the Unity Software (e.g., 2018.x and 2018.y and any Long Term Supported (LTS) versions for that current-year release) according to the terms that applied just prior to the Updated Terms (the “Prior Terms”)”
This meant that if you didn’t agree with the new terms, you could continue using a different version of Unity and the new terms wouldn’t apply to you. In April 2023, they removed that clause completely. A week ago, they announced new terms: every game install will be charged a fee of up to $0.20 starting next year, depending on what Unity subscription the developers have and how much revenue/installs the game receives.
This change was set to cover all existing Unity games, even ones made on older versions. Any time anyone installed the game, even if they had installed it previously, the developer would be charged a fee. Many of the games made with Unity are under $20, with some of the popular ones being $5 or less. Immediately people thought of ways this could be trouble: Scripts to install the same game over and over, people sharing their game libraries with family/friends, those with multiple computers/laptops/tablets.
Unity announced on Sep 17, 2023 that they would not be going forward with this new policy:
We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical feedback.
It’s unclear what Unity will do now. Many developers have started looking at an alternative called Godot, and some even plan on canceling their Unity subscription because they have lost faith in the company.
Unity is a tool that game developers use to build games. You don’t have to use Unity, but lots of really popular games use it and it makes development easier. Recently, the company behind Unity (also called Unity) decided to add an extra fee for using Unity. That would have been bad enough, but Unity went with adding a fee in which the game developers need to pay every single time a customer installs their game.
This was a startlingly bad idea, because you end up punishing games that sell well. But it also opens up entire cans of worms, because trolls could easily mess with developers by simply buying a game, then installing, uninstalling, then reinstalling again and again. And because the fee is applied per install, a single troll could easily build up massive fees for the developers. On top of that, this new fee is applied retroactively to all games that were built with Unity. So it doesn’t matter if you built your game 10 years ago - you’ll still get charged if a user installs your game.
In response, many developers are pushing to boycott Unity, with many saying that they would go bankrupt with the new fees. It also came to light that many of the top executives at Unity sold a large number of their shares in the company shortly before making the announcement of the new fee, showing that the top executives knew that the fee would be unpopular but went with it anyways. It also brought up the concern that they were engaging in insider trading, which is illegal.
Pretty much because all these indictments are also bringing up stuff that happened a few years ago. It’s clear that it just takes that long to do the whole process, and maybe they had to wait until after he was president anyway. So I started thinking about all the other shit he did, and this one stood out as one of the worst.
There was a novel material called LK-99 that was purported to be a superconductor at standard temperature/pressure, but it turns out not to be. If it were true, it would’ve been a revolutionary breakthrough.
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