The amount of Excel/spreadsheets I use in my hobbies and "leisure" time is massive. Otherwise, it's mostly about having surrendered to the presence of online ads.

Oh, finally! I'm certain it's going to fall completely on its face, but at least they're finally acknowledging that the issue exists.

We need a scraper rather than an API caller.

You seem to have missed the vast majority of my point, so I'll ask this directly - do you, or do you not, support the continued existence of shadow libraries?

Everyone needs to vote. Period. Doesn't matter which side you're on. If everyone actually in the voter rolls votes in person with ID, there's no room for either side to claim it was stolen or manipulated.

Frankly, you're incorrect. It's an incredible pain in the neck to try and deal with the Fediverse beyond local content. Without better community merging or centralization, browsing instances becomes no different than dealing with having mail on three or four non-multiplexed BBSes, or talking on forums before we had tabbed browsing. It's incredibly annoying, and pushes people right back to centralized systems.

There's already porn in the fediverse. I don't see a problem with it existing, but it's always bothered me when porn and social media get mixed. That's not necessarily because of prudishness or shame, but rather the fact that social media often employs dark patterns of addiction, and porn addiction can become very real, very quickly. I think we need to be careful about it, and I think there should be an onus on platforms as well as producers to help protect the vulnerable against addiction and the downward spiral.

Did JoshStrifeHayes do a video on it recently that I missed?

As a former user of Prodigy, all I ever wanted was for the Sears catalog to be accessible on there, as it was dying. They could have done exactly what Amazon did, but with the brand power of Sears. Home delivery was a solved problem for them - hell, Sears' Home Delivery could literally deliver homes! Look it up, you will find houses still standing that were prefabbed and delivered. Yes, we damn well should have shut up and bought things. I say this having been one of the world champs of the Prodigy Carmen Sandiego - one of the kids they wanted to just shut up. If my family could have bought everything from Sears (& K-Mart) from Prodigy, we would have!

Sell me a thing worth buying and I'll shut up and buy it. Sell me snow in the winter, I'll just shut up and walk away.

As for LJ, yeah, a lot of English speaking people had no idea about it. I saw it when I looked up the company buying LJ. Many of my friends at the time moved to IJ & DJ. I wasn't hurt, I wasn't affected directly, so I stayed until I got bored.

That's how I feel about social media - I'm there till it bores me. Give me something worth buying, I'll shut up and buy it.

They don't even care about logins anymore. They care about advertising impressions, sponsored post engagements, and ad conversions. Marketers on the platform don't care about how many users they have, they care about impressions, clicks, and conversions. That's all it comes down to - are you providing value by trackably converting on an ad, buying Reddit Gold, or subscribing to Premium? If not, why are you being a drain on server resources that could be used to benefit a paying customer?

This is absolutely the thing to note about it. No matter how you feel about the situation, your health must come first, then your family's, then that of your friends, and so on. Work outward in concentric circles when you are ready to do so, but always be sure that your health (both mental and physical) is being supported and maintained.

Don't let Reddit or any other company or group drag you down.

Disregard the API completely and just scrape the web interface of specific subreddits. It really doesn't matter that things won't update in real time.