I believe not going with that hed will get you executed in an unfortunate press accident.

Like running a sports hed of "Niagara Loses."

I mean sure, it was a bit buggy, but holding a 20 year grudge on Risk of Rain seems excessive. Especially considering it came out only 12 years ago.

Same. I didn't use RoR before it was cool.

(Honestly I just didn't like the syntax of Ruby and there were tons of great alternatives already by the time I was looking)

IP and copyright are both tools used to control individuals, not corporations. We are seeing the reality in realtime with LLMs disregarding them wholesale.

in general, yes. 404 is a reader-funded tech news site, staffed by a bunch of experienced, professional tech journalists. That said, I don't blame people for asking for an archive link.

There's already alternative implementations, with somewhat different featuresets:

• Akkoma (more minimalist than Mastodon; Elixir in the backend): https://akkoma.social/
• Misskey (much more feature-rich than Mastodon; Typescript in the backend; extremely Japanese): https://misskey-hub.net/en/

Having said that, frankly, I doubt that the Ruby ecosystem will fall apart from this. There's too many non-volunteers whose wage depends on Ruby to keep going...

I host my own Akkoma instance and it's great. easier to set up than Mastodon, more light weight, etc. Only downside is the UI is a bit of a cluster and you really need to do some editing to make it look decent. Haven't had any issues interacting with anyone on Mastodon and what have you.

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20250929132913/https://www.404media.co/how-ruby-went-off-the-rails/