To my knowledge, the current status of x formerly known as twitter, is that it is terrible. Elon has fired most of the staff, part of that staff was content monitors that should delete misinformation before it gains too much traction. The EU holds websites responsible if they don’t at least try dealing with it. Lemmy is not even a blip on their radar, and would not even be easily threatened being a collection of random servers
I pirate music to archive it. I use youtube revanced to listen to music but the songs just disappear from my playlists with no way to know what dissapeared, spotify is nice but I still like to keep my music locally.
I pirate movies to also keep them, I don’t have a DVD player so paying just for digital copies where ownership is questionable seems not worth it. Better to pirate and have it forever then to buy it and lose is it due to changes in policy or regional blocking. Streaming services are just not worth it, small roster of movies so you have to use different services for each movie. So simply not even worth the hassle
I pirate most book, finding books I want in English is not possible and the best alternative is amazon which I’d rather not feed money.
For games I have basic rules:
Indie games are mostly offlimits, I’d rather support the studio (I might pirate indie games to see if I like them, since most don’t have demos but I would buy them if I liked them)
Pirating bigger games I look at the developer and publisher. I pirate games made or published by companies I don’t like, for examle: EA (generally disliked for squeezing every ounce of profit out of games, too many micro-transactions) or blizzard/activion(Sexual harassment allegations, corporate greed). No need to support such companies just take what they make while they’re here.
Publishers can also ruin games, look at how deep silver betrayed metro fans and signed and exclusive contract with epic last minute.
As lord Gaben did say, piracy is just an issue of convenience but I would like to also add the factor of security of keeping them.
Will the megathread be transfered here?
Article may be exaggerating the possible escalation if ukraine fully looses the war. But your comment makes no sense. US is not at liberty to force the US into a decision by itself, for that europe would have accept that and it could very well brake NATO (Not even mentioning a partizan movement if Ukraine would lose). Not sure why would Russia want Ukraine to surrender a land that they were already occupying for what, eight years? This is less of a conspiracy and more of an actual possibility, no NATO country is at liberty to defy russia with their own soldiers without being attacked first. Any conflict between nuclear powers could easily escalate into nuclear war, any direct confrontation between NATO countries besides the US could still lead to that as a chain reaction.