Gray

Fuck Intuit and H&R Block, all my homies use FreeTaxUSA.

This isn't necessarily always true. PCSX2, the main PS2 emulator, for example needs a BIOS file that can only be obtained from an actual PS2 (or "illegally"). I'm not sure why that emulator requires it when others don't. The closest thing to an explanation I could find online just said "legal issues", but didn't go into details. That makes me suspect that there was pushback from Sony about the emulator. So if such emulation laws were to be written they absolutely should protect in stone the right to create and use emulators. If a company can find a loophole to block you, they will.

To me, the larger issue for the world outside of Russia is the ensuing chaos would be pretty scary when there are nukes sitting around. All it would take is one bad actor to get ahold of those for bad things to happen. I don't think it's likely and I can't currently see the motivations for using nukes on any other nations apart from Russia itself and Ukraine, but chaos is chaos and many would consider the evil we know to be safer than whatever else lurks around the corner.

Personally, though, despite being aware of this it would regardless please me so much to see Putin fall. I would especially love to see Russia democratize more, but I'm afraid that's probably a pipe dream anytime soon. Uncontrolled chaos generally doesn't lend itself to more democracy.

This is very true in my experience. My college expenses were slashed in half when I moved out of the dorm and into a tiny studio apartment across the city from my campus. It also really hurt my ability to study when I was so far from campus. It hurt my studies even moreso when I needed to take on a part time job to try mitigating the costs of my rent. It's a really toxic system, because the parts of cities with universties tend to be the expensive parts of cities.

I think the main issue we run into with the concept of a user account server is that banning needs to be an ability that someone somewhere has. If someone starts posting some highly illegal content we need a way to ban them. But then invariably giving someone that power is exactly what centralization is. Separating that one user server into multiple leads to other awkward outcomes as I posted elsewhere in this thread. Namely, you end up back where we started where certain instances ban certain user servers that are known to host problematic people.

The primary reason to have an account with Lemmy, Kbin, or Mastodon as opposed to each other really just comes down to UI preference more than anything else. Which design feels the most clean to you. What special features have the devs built into the platform. That's really it. Though it's also worth mentioning that they're emulating different types of social media. Lemmy and Kbin are emulating the same type - the forum style we recognize from Reddit. Mastodon is emulating the Twitter "microblog" type of social media. Frendica is emulating Facebook. PeerTube is emulating video sharing services like YouTube and so on. So reading Mastodon data in Lemmy would be like trying to read tweets as Reddit threads. It doesn't transfer very well. As far as I've heard, Kbin is trying to create a better way of reading Mastodon style data within their platform. In the long term I'm willing to bet many of these platforms will implement similar cross-functionality for the different "versions" of social media.