For AI training? Or why would someone specifically pay attention to watermarks? I believe there are curated datasets out there. And watermark detectors to weed out watermarked pictures from a pile of data. I don’t think the general public sorts by presence of watermarks…
And I’m not sure about games and webcomics. They all have some logo somewhere, because they’ve been made by someone. If you don’t want that, you’re looking for white-label products. I think in the realm of privacy, and those product types, that’s a small to non-existent niche.

I’m not sure what to recommend. Usually that’s a time when you re-align your values and are dropped into a new world with different responsibilities. Around 18 you’ve finished school and now start an apprenticeship or you go to university and inevitably meet a lot of new people there. In university there are a lot of different groups. For extroverts/introverts gaming nerds. You just have to go and meet them. That pretty much solves the issue.
If you start working right away (and don’t have to attend school for that), it’ll be way more difficult.

And I think the area close to the border is a pretty rural area. Meeting similar-minded people or finding clubs might be difficult. I always recommend meeting people while doing something you like. Because you’ll meet people who have something in common. A hobby or something like that.

Or find a youth center, do some volunteering… Find out where the local computer nerds meet. Maybe a sports club. There are introverts everywhere and the atmosphere of every club is different. Ofentimes you have to try and find out if you’re feeling accepted there.

I’d say a lot in music is about structure, patterns, repetition etc. And endings of words being similar is part of that.

What’s their age group (roughly)?

Exacty that. I’d agree: about 3 or 4 accounts, judging by what I read. Often got some genuine and constructive answers… Never listening and predetermined that everything is futile and set on dragging themself down. Dismissing every help and then posting the same question again, a few days later. This time the post is a bit different, though.

I already wished them the best and said I hope they get help, a few weeks ago. I don’t think OP is a troll, but ill. But OP can’t escape their unhealthy behaviour. Usually the first step is to realize there is something wrong and you have to do something. But I think that is a solid barrier for them. OP rather indulges in self-pity and brushes everything aside and blames circumstances.

I mean there are people who want to feel victimized or want to feel the feeling of pain. But that’s definitely not normal. And they need to talk to a professional about that.

I think I know your posts from a while back under different usernames. And no, giving up on everything isn’t healthy or normal.

Maybe you can find some more discussion and the reasoning in their documentation or Github issues or pull requests. I bet this has been discussed before someone implemented it. Maybe there’s also a way to restore the old behaviour.

We also had expensive engineering software at university. Oftentimes it’s a major PITA for everyone. The PhD students have to get their work done and are met by the software refusing to start because all licenses are taken. Sometimes someone forgot to log off or the computer crashed and the software takes most of the day to recover that license. Or some people do like 5 simulations in parallel. Or lock the computer, go home and block a license. The IT department will get lots of calls and have to deal with it. Especially when the pool of licenses is small. And it takes additinal effort to coordinate practical courses and excercises where you teach a group of 24 people which then need half the license pool available at a fixed time each week, despite the daily routine of everyone else.

And I’m not even sure if the people responsible, care too much for pirated software. But they’re liable. Of course they write strongly worded mails when talking to everyone. It’s their IT infrastructure and they can’t have people do illegal things with it. Especially not while having an expensive contract with some supplyer. They can’t have anyone leak a mail where they endorse piracy. Or post screenshots or turn in assignments or papers with screenshots that say “unregistered copy” in the bottom corner. And once students do silly things and the piracy is on display publicly, they’ll have to do something. Usually that’s writing a strongly worded email first. Because that takes next to no effort. I think the usual IT department doesn’t care as long as things go smoothly, people do their various things and no one complains. They usually have other stuff to do. That makes me think in this story something must have happened that warranted some form of public reaction or at least show they addressed it and they have it in writing.

And I think the rest of the mail fits such IT people. They said why they do it and that they can’t have piracy connected to the institutes name. They say they need some incoming complaints to justify buying more licenses. And the punishment fits the crime. They just disconnect the computer from their network and it’s not their problem anymore. I think that’s fair.

That’s a good idea. I think it’s a bit problematic under these circumstances since OP wants to host game files which are probably some larger binaries. And that’s going to show a different usage pattern and more traffic than the usual code. I don’t know if they monitor things like that and remove these repos. But I have to remember that idea.

And an idea regarding the links: I’ve tried some emulators and do some retrogaming every now and the. Usually these projects take some care to not list the sites with the ROM collections on their official pages. As a user you usually go to archive.org and download things from there or scroll through their forum or subreddit and that kind of info pops up pretty quickly. So once they have an active community it spreads via word of mouth. Maybe you can also post a sticky you’re not affiliated with websites like X and Y, but you’d have to ask a lawyer if that’s alright.

I guess some people just don’t care and do it anyways. And I’m not sure how much the copyright industry and courts care about people chatting about copyright infringement and not actually doing it at that place. Could be protected by free spech in some jurisdictions. You can obviously live in a place that doesn’t care about copyright. But I guess people don’t move across the world just for that.

You could find bulletproof hosting pay anonymously and take care to never mention any personal information about you. But given what you said, that’s not what you want. I’d split responsibility between several people and let someone else do the copyright infringement. Someone who lives someplace else and doesn’t engage themselves on the website. And focus on the development and the legal aspect of it. Or just do the illegal part and not do the software. But I imaging it’s really complicated to do both sides of that coin in one person… And I suppose running an illegal website costs more money than running a regular one.

Why do you downvote all the stuff anyways?

They collapse as well. But PieFed is pretty open to new ideas. If someone likes it differently and decides to address it, it can probably be changed.

Is there some precedent to believe that they correlate (encrypted) datacenter traffic, find the patterns and actually use that somehow?

I mean I can see how that’d theoretically work under certain circumstances and low network load on the VPN server. But that’s really complicated, circumstantial, unreliable and takes lots of effort and probably can’t be used in court anyways. So I wonder if that’s ever been done. Maybe for some circumstancial evidence for some proper crimes to find out where to investigate? And I mean I’m pretty sure the NSA snoops everywhere. Still they’re unlikely to be able to look inside with just these tools. And they’re also unlikely to prosecute some swedish user for some lame copyright violation.

Knowing things about people and having lots of info on them gives someone power over them. And they don’t just do it for fun. They have some motives. I’d also rather not give it to some authoritan regime.

Ultimately everyone has to decide… Do I tell everyone my exact salary? Do I keep it to some people and not tell others? Do I close the blinds of the bedroom while having intimacy? And what harm is there in the neighbors knowing what I like to do in private?

To add a bit: It doesn’t make a difference whether you’re use a cable or the wifi. It’s still the same internet connection. What helps is the VPN connection. And it doesn’t really matter if you’re setting it to your home country or a random one. If it protects you as intended, they can’t find you either way. And if it doesn’t, you may be screwed either way.

Thanks for the clarification. I think we’re on the same page. Especially the following resonates with me:

The time to set our tolerance levels for certain behaviors is now before we get too big to reign it in.

And I’d agree we need to do that in the context of what we have. Have a step back and think before doing something.
I don’t want to see that as an excuse to stay inert, though. But at the same time we may not skip it.

I frequently disagree with the Lemmy developers’ take on things. But what I give them high credit for, is not to prefer growth above other things. I wrote this post now, because I think the Reddit exodus is far away now. Things have settled. And the argument “let things settle first” is out of the way now. And as you pointed out we might have reached a steady plateau for now. I think that’s a comfortable position from where we can decide what to do.

Oh, forget what I said. I was going to write a lenthy reply… But in fact it is configurable in the user profile. -10 is just the default value.

Thanks for your nuanced comments. I’ve never moderated any community worth mentioning, so that’s quite some additional insight for me. I’m not entirely new to this either, as you might have deducted from my account age. I’ve moved away from lemmy.ml as my own values don’t properly align with theirs. Then I lost an account because the instance I was on died. And recently I switched to PieFed and that’s my current account. But all in all I’ve been here since well before the exodus. Still, I think we have a different perspective. I’ve attended a bit more to the technical side and using it, while you’ve been fostering a community, which I didn’t do at all.

I’m not sure what to make of your “helped me get through feeling much like OP”. I’m not sure if I have to come to terms with how things are. Or if we instead should improve the place to become what I (and other people?) envision it to be. Sure, it’s not black and white. And when you’re doing critism (as I did), you focus on the negatives. I tried to also mention the other side. But due to the nature of this post, it’s not been the focus.

I’ll take some more time thinking about what you and all the other people said. I definitely see the potential of this platform. And that’s why I’m here. I also see some issues and lack of progress with some things. And that hurts because I like this place. And I kind of refuse to accept it and change my expectations. I don’t want it to be perfect. But there’s quite some room for improvement (I think) and that made me speak up and post this.

I don’t know. I halfway agree and halfway disagree. We’ve always had things change. I always found a comfortable niche. Lots of Free Software exists, despite the odds being against them. I almost exclusively use software that respects my freedom. At least in private. The important thing is we pick up the fight. And concerning the services I use, we regularly succeed.

I don’t really care for Reddit, or all the people moving to Discord. And their millions of users. All I want is a nice niche with an atmosphere I like. And enough users who are aligned with my interests so I can talk about what I like.

And I think you’re right and Lemmy -as is- isn’t stopping any trend. Because we can see it’s stagnating. It’d have to change to do that. Provide anything meaningful to users that they don’t have some place else. Whatever that is, great software functionality, nice people, good content… (Ideally all of that.)

I’m a bit the wrong receiver for that kind of information. I’m not on lemmy.world but run my own instance. I’ve donated days worth of developer hours already, and I’m planning to do more… But I can’t speak for other people.

And I dislike money being involved. That leads to obligations, envy, and people stop doing it for the fun and because it’s a nice platform. I think that shifts things and I’m not sure if in a good way. We’d get closer to commercial interests and we already have enough commercial platforms. I liked the old way how Free Software worked. Some random people doing it out of their own motivation. Coming up with all kinds of interesting software that’d help them. And they’d generously share it and invite everyone to participate. And it’d stop there. No ulterior motives involved.

But with that said, yeah. Someone has to do the development, pay for the servers and do the community work. That’s not optional. And we have a broader issue with money in the Free and Open Source ecosystem.