yes; as far as i’m aware there has never been a mass-death event like this in the contemporary history of the Hajj, although it’s always been arduous and more potentially deadly when it falls during the summer

you may take the United Fruit Company’s name, but you can’t take its legacy of financing terrorism and violence in Latin America…

Obviously, my point is that beehaw admins should accept that they made a mistake and refederate with sh.itjust.works. I would also recommend upgrading to the latest version of Lemmy, because it at least gives users the option of instance blocking. I understand that you intend to move to Sublinks or another platform in the future, but in the meantime you are neglecting your users by allowing the current implementation on Lemmy to languish.

unless we’re compelled to, it is exceedingly unlikely we will upgrade. we are fully committed to moving off the platform so it just makes no sense to prioritize Lemmy updates.

with respect to refederation: we already polled that with both SJW and LW months ago and were given a very definitive no, do not refederate from our userbase. only 11% and 17% of our users were in favor of refederation respectively, and majorities were fine with continued defederation from both. our defederation policy was also strongly supported. (i believe this is the first time these numbers have been posted because they were so definitively in favor of the status quo.)

At the time that they defederated SJW, Beehaw was more that 3 times larger, at about 12k total/3k monthly users. Now, SJW is more than 5 times larger than Beehaw, which has dwindled to just 450 monthly users.

we’re not and have never been in this for numbers so this is immaterial to us–we’ve been quite public that we’d be fine having a community of a few dozen people, because that’s what we were before the Reddit fiasco. in any case: please understand that we are not responsible for the health of the Lemmy ecosystem. and even if we were (which we reject categorically) we have definitively been told to leave the platform because of our disagreements with the Lemmy developers. bettering this platform is no longer a priority for us in any way–and it is the general opinion of the team that we wasted a lot of time prioritizing that given the developer antipathy toward us. you can read more on that here if you’d like.

this is actually quite cute, i think.

our previous fiscal host is dissolving at the end of the year–most of the details are over in our previous announcement post; all contributions go toward keeping the website up and paying for any labor associated with it outside of admin work

to be honest with you i have no clue what the logistics are for donations themselves. my intuition is… no, having managed our finances for the reports? but Chris almost certainly has a better idea of this than me.

no, everything is still in USD (although i think the switch means we’re losing slightly more to payment processing)

i am aware of what a mod is and literally used it at you in reply–what you call them, however, has no relevance at all to my point. you’ve earned the thread’s first 3 day ban for your unnecessarily weird attitude about this.

ask any old-timer fanfiction writer about this. “fan work” as a whole–including mods–is a gigantic gray space in current copyright law and IP holders are almost certainly within their technical legal rights to prohibit any works like Revolution on a blanket basis. the current arrangement where most rightsholders look the other way and/or accept the existence of such fan works is a largely informal one, and there’s nothing codifying it being that way. it could arbitrarily change (or just be fucked up by a court case) at pretty much any time–and, indeed, occasionally rightsholders still do try and enforce their IP quite aggressively.

i guess this is a bit opaque but: pretty much any (formal or informal) mod action or guidance that isn’t completely self-evident (i.e. spam removal, approving users, pinning threads) has been seen by at least two or three other mods, usually more depending on who’s around. that includes this informal correction from me upthread. the site-wide mod team is aware of what i said because we have a chat for vibe checking stuff like this–and straightforwardly, if they disagreed with how i responded or the substance of what i said, then the posts would not still be up because i’d delete or amend them.

This is nitpicky and toxic.

are we seriously calling “pointing out that the argument being made has been changed in a rhetorical sleight of hand because the original argument is completely wrong” nitpicky and toxic now? come on. this is a piss take and bordering on “let’s look the other way when someone is making a false argument that aligns with what i want to be true”.

were this Nintendo, they’d be receiving rightful backlash, but people, like you, online will give a pass due to the sheer fact that it’s Valve doing the takedown.

well… now you’re indicating that this kind of isn’t hyperbole from you, because you’re just straight arguing the underlying (and still incorrect) “hyperbolic” point now, lol

Yes, hyperbole is non-falsefiable. It’s a rhetorical device, not a claim unto itself.

i mean i think this is just obviously ridiculous. if someone said “every person who dislikes Valve is a pedophile who hurts children” or whatever hyperbolically i think it’d be silly to say that’s non-falsifiable just because it’s hyperbolic. there’s still an underlying and incorrect claim being made

you run into the same issue: being hyperbolic here doesn’t really work if literally the same week of your hyperbole, something directly countering the hyperbolic point you’re making happens. hyperbole isn’t non-falsifiable or unimpeachable just because it’s hyperbole and intended to be humorous–you can still be hyperbolically wrong, and in this case you are.

While we really dug the game (you can check out our review for more on that), there’s one odd detail that stuck out we can’t help but give its own article: one of the game’s minor NPCs will be voiced by a text-to-speech program at launch, seemingly because someone — probably Ubisoft — forgot to record and add a human being’s voice for the role.

what a… weird thing to have happen. i’m not sure what the utility of it would be for one minor NPC but this being an accident honestly strains charitability, i think

TF2: Source 2 was, in short, because they were using assets they didn’t have the license to

Let’s not give Valve a pass just because they can lazily and baselessly say “um nintendo!” about it.

okay but this was not your initial argument–this is an entirely separate issue from it, actually. your argument was “Valve about to become as litigious as Nintendo with IP they’ve let rot.” and that is demonstrably false or they wouldn’t have let Portal Revolution release. if they were going to be litigious about the Portal IP, why would they DMCA Portal64 but not Revolution?

to me, this is clearly an example of incorrectly getting mad about something and then shifting the goalposts to not have to take the L.

this is clearly not true, Portal literally just got a huge fangame with a Steam release. the issue is entirely that it uses Nintendo stuff and the guy even says as much