If you join an official public server, there’s an extremely high chance you’ll join with cheater bots that spawn endless, aimbotting snipers. It’s less of a problem on community servers as they’re actively moderated by players, but official servers have to rely on vote kicking a fresh cheater bot every few minutes.

This is all done by some script kiddy group who apparently want to highlight Valve’s deprecated support. Basically ruin the game until Valve fixes the game. There’s also some measure of farming ingame item drops to sell for money, I think.

Honestly, I don’t believe save TF2 will get anywhere. Valve is clearly uninterested in supporting the game, and who could fault them? It’s an old game, and games don’t need to be supported just because people play them.

The real problem Valve is playing with is that TF2 is still monetized. They should not be selling microtransactions for a game this broken. If they weren’t selling microtransactions, they would be entirely in their right to kill all official support and leave the game to community servers.

My main concern is that Valve will calculate this over the bad PR they’re receiving, and rather than do anything to curb the bot problem, simply kill their support for TF2. I would be okay with this. I think most people wanting to #SaveTF2 won’t be.

that amount of money is simply not able to be accrued quickly, ethically, legally, and safely. a loan is the only thing that comes to my mind other than crime time. you could try visiting mutual aid communities and crowdfunding. you’ll get something from your comrades, at least, but probably not 24k

asking the real questions

i don’t have an answer but im here for the question

in a few hundred years historians will look back at this time of the internet and feel extremely frustrated that we had perfect record keeping systems that would retain all this knowledge and culture forever but we for some reason let companies blackhole it

Sweet, time to finish some of the horrible projects 14 year old me started

‘Cuz you ain’t been doin nothin’, if you ain’t been called a red, if you’ve marched or agitated, then you’re bound to hear it said…

I’m building up to doing the same. Already using Protonmail and Kagi. Looking for a less Google-dependent phone to switch over to and then I might pull the plug myself.

I’m feeling positive, too. You can’t undo the progres made in the decentralized network space. Every loss for big tech is a win for us. I don’t hold much hope that decentralized networks are going to sweep the globe and return the internet to it’s former glory. But I do think we’ll always have a space, and that space can only get bigger.

Seconding Kagi. The pricing model is a little rough, but if you’re serious about getting the most out of a search engine, Kagi is the way to go.

Imo, paying is worth it to be completely free of Google’s services.

Lmao my B. I have my stupid hat on today.

I could not imagine stanning a company’s ability to run ads. Like, I don’t care about ads. Worse, I am actively antagonistic towards the concept of ads. I cannot get into the headspace of this poster. What a loser.

Lemmy is pretty dense to a newcomer, especially one who is used to the centralized web. But that’s okay - we don’t need Lemmy to replace Reddit. Just like Mastodon, this ‘temporary exodus’ is only beneficial for this platform.

Even when the drama ‘blows over’ and Reddit is back to its usual status, we will have gained a huge amount of new users interested in a decentralized web. As long as there are enough users for Lemmy, I think that’s okay.