If they’re really just after data at all costs, they could easily spin up an instance that has no apparent link to threads and federate secretly. I agree with other arguments about not federating with them but idk, all these data privacy arguments against federating with threads are so dumb. If they want it, they’ll get it because getting it is so absurdly easy.

Not sure what you mean. They can already pull any public data on lemmy, as can anyone else.

he used to accept donations way back but stopped since he felt like he could make do without them

He actually has channel memberships now but with absolutely no perks lol. There’s no expectation to become a member which is nice. I’ve been subbed to the $2/mo tier for about a year or two now. Been watching etho for like 10 so it’s nice to support a little more directly than blocking ads lol.

Definitely some of the best production value on youtube. Even his stuff from 10+ years ago holds up incredibly well aside from the resolution.

Same haha. Doc is not part of scicraft and never was but he’s good friends with them. A lot of his builds in the past couple seasons of hermitcraft were designed by scicraft members or at least friends of scicraft. He’s usually in voice chat on the scicraft discord a couple days per week.

No problem! Always happy to talk about this weird niche corner of the minecraft community haha. I think it goes without saying but people who are part of the technical community are really some of the most dedicated players for the whole game so I think balancing things could really promote more creativity and challenge for those who want it without adding more grind for the casual player base!

Not really off the top of my head so I’ll elaborate on the points I’ve already made to demonstrate why I think these things are such an issue. It also goes to show that with a few minor changes, Mojang would be able to balance these things super easily.

Portal based farms are really the worst culprit, imo. It’s the meta for loads and loads of different mob farms and just consists of a cube of portals making all these once separate farming concepts basically the same. They’re also incredibly overpowered and yield huge amounts of items. I remember back in the day people spent lots of time perfecting the designs of their big farms and there really hasn’t been much interesting development in the tech community because portal based farms are super fast, easy to throw together, and get you more items than most other designs. I think removing them would force people to be more creative again. This is a pretty common sentiment in a large part of the tech community. Here are a couple of portal farms and you’ll see that things get boring real fast:

Slime: https://youtu.be/cerBKl6Gzeg?si=27PPAqpeVaOmJ8ID

Guardian: https://youtu.be/n_IH6LUYyMk?si=fAtOK47fv-5Qhjvs

Ghast (I’m on mobile so I can’t timestamp but you can skip about 30mins in): https://youtu.be/ZlefdidnABI?si=H7Rlhb3yKIB8SyVp

Wither skeletons: https://youtu.be/Dj5JedJuXrY?si=7JjKvU5uMYlmY3Pz

There are quite a few more mobs that can be farms in the same way but I think that proves the point enough.

Raid farms tech has also gotten absurd lately if you check out this: https://youtu.be/owuP8P4s_8g?si=2sjTYPAHNG0dVcfi. That farm produces hundreds of thousands of items per hour and can be built in an hour or two. The raid stacking mechanics are really overpowered. I think raid farms should definitely be a thing and some of the simpler designs are decently balanced but stacking farms are game breaking. For reference, this farm yields more witch drops than scicraft’s witch farm project which took years to finish.

I’m really just speaking in terms of my little niche corner of the game. Nerfing portal based farms or stacking raid farms wouldn’t really effect anyone outside of technical players because it requires some obsidian farming setup as a barrier or entry. Stacking raid farms, while easy to build for technical servers, are still a little bit above the skill level where it would be something casual players would build.

I know that you can always just not build these farms if they’re boring, but it’s really stagnated cool farm development in the entire community. It’s more than just an individual decision because most tech servers these days just reluctantly go the easy route because the time and effort involved in developing more interesting concepts isn’t worth it in comparison to the amount of items you get from the easy route. I’ve also played on tech servers where we agreed to work on a new concept but some players decide to just go and build a portal based farm anyways discouraging people from spending their time to design a new farm for items which we already have plenty of.

I want the mechanics to have more depth and to be more challenging and fun to work with. Most normies don’t build farms so the game would be pretty much unchanged for them. You could still make easy farms if you want to dip your toes into it but the effort to reward ratio would be more balanced.

What’s great about minecraft is that it can be enjoyed by kids but there’s a lot of depth to what you can do as well. No one complained that it was too difficult to make iron farms before the changes. Also kids likely aren’t farming thousands of obsidian blocks to make portal based farms either. There’s a balance that can be made.

I also didn’t notice any big change between 1.13 and 1.14 unless you mean the light level thing?

They entirely overhauled villager trading making it a game of just placing and breaking workstations to get the trades you want. The pre-1.14 mechanics were a lot better and more rewarding imo. Iron golem spawning was also totally overhauled and they’re just too dead simple these days. You can build a 900 ingot per hour farm in about 10 minutes or less.

People will always find a way to break the system, and for longtime Minecraft players, it’s nice not having to do all gathering by hand, instead being able to use your knowledge to create a ridiculous farm is… Cool imo.

I love farming, I’m a technical player so that’s my main focus. I’m saying that the recent changes have really diminished the skill and fun in creating certain farms. Like how portal based farms have been the new meta for basically everything. Just changing it so mobs have a cooldown period after spawning before they can go through portals would be a massive nerf and force people to actually develop cooler farm concepts.

The game has overall become way too easy. 1.14 villagers completely broke gameplay making trading and building iron farms way too boring. The pre-1.14 mechanics were way more balanced and fun. Raid farms are just way too powerful especially with the nerf to natural spawning that 1.18 brought making witch farms basically unusable. Loads of features like that which just made things too easy. It feels like you’re rewarded too much for very little effort.

Chat reports and microsoft migration are also really controversial, of course.

Not to say that they haven’t made lots of positive changes but that’s my main gripe with the development over the past few years.

That’s a security risk because users can log in as other users. Regardless, if you paid for the game, you should be able to play on third party multiplayer servers.

The most concerning thing to me is the fact that they can ban users from playing on their own servers. Moderation should be on the server owners imo. Microsoft being able to ban someone from their own server that they self host or pay to host via a third party is a big issue.

That being said, I don’t think that Microsoft’s moderation has been as apocalyptic as a lot of people made it out to be. It’s just the principle that I take some issue with.

They’ve made some pretty awful changes to the game since. That being said, I bet minecraft would have fizzled out if microsoft didn’t purchase them. They’re still pumping out regular updates and its popularity is huge. I’d definitely consider the acquisition an overall win.

Oof that’s a bummer.

I was speaking more in the sense for general browsing. I’m not familiar with the admin tools for any of the apps.

Source? The sync dev said that google’s ad code isn’t ever initialized if you pay. Don’t see why it wouldn’t be the same with boost.

Literally no one on the face of the earth has ever said that. We’re actually talking about an app that has a paid option without ads.

Comparing a solo dev to large corporations isn’t really convincing me.

I don’t know about that. I’m a sync user and some of the foss options are very good by now. I use sync because of familiarity and I like the dev so don’t mind dropping some money to support him.