Lurking isn’t a bad thing, at least to me, it is appreciated. I do want to see people discussing updates and things about the game as well, but my main goal is to have an easy place to follow news about the game without having to go to Reddit, Twitter, or worse Discord. For anyone reading this, that means if I missed something or I decided it wasn’t important enough to post myself, but you do, go ahead and post it. Just give it a tag for indexing sake like [EN News] or whatever else fits. Though to anyone who is a simple lurker, I ask but one thing, that is to subscribe, because it is the only way I know if people are even reading. It just takes being logged in once, and then you can follow the RSS feed without even having to open a Lemmy webpage.

I wanted to write two points, one of which is important and the other just a long winded aside. Since this is such a long post, I split it in half and put the important point above. You can ignore the second half if you like. I’m sure it is something you have probably read many times on Reddit and Lemmy’s more meta boards, except written concisely by actual wordsmiths instead.

It would be a bit much to ask general users to go over to federated communities, which is why I am not. I apologize for being obtuse. Being new to federated communities, I did not realize the implication I was making when I said I wished people would say no to Reddit, Twitter, etc. When I wrote that, I was in the mindset of my personal usage of the internet, which is 90% websites run by individuals such as forums, imageboards, blogs, and so on. Users can say no to a corporate web without moving to a fediverse.

Alternatives to corporate walled gardens are a simple web search away. They are sometimes as large or larger than their joyless corporate stock-white cousins. The old internet didn’t suddenly disappear when Myspace became big after all. Even old farmers I know discuss with each other on websites that predates Pokemon. To interact they simply register with a username, password, and then post. No phone number, third party authentication, real life details, or whatever else Alphabet, Meta, or whoever is asking for these days. Users don’t even have to necessarily stop using corporate sites altogether. They just have to learn to put up an actual protest instead of just laying down helplessly and saying there is nothing to be done, or worse yet attacking other users who want to point out when corporate actions are an issue for a website.

I know I am preaching to the choir. I just wanted to nuance a point that is sometimes willfully or otherwise overlooked by those in favor of a federated web.