People didn’t purge their comments to remove this information from the public, but they purged it from reddit making money off limiting the access to this information.

Reddit was always making money off their content. The tragedy is that the common knowledge is destroyed. They didn’t bother to copy it to a public place, they just nuked information and context. The loss is for newcomers on any topics. The result is the same old questions being asked over and over, which all social media sites (including Lemmy thrive on FRESH content).

people joined basically with no terms of service on a lot of Lemmy instances.

Free and open information, like Wikipedia, used to be an ideal. I have used Reddit since 2008 or earlier because it got on search engines and shared information consistently on precise topics. Twitter used to also be this way, but now mostly only puts paid subscribers on search engines.

If you are to organize information around topics, such as a Commodore 64 community, and the protocol openly allows copies to be made via federation, I encourage people to have the attitude that information be treated like Wikipedia content. It sucks now that so much information from 10 years ago has been just entirely lost now that so many deliberately purged their Reddit comments, etc. Tragedy of the commons. And it drags down the entire planet that people squirrel away discussions on topics that are generally public. It’s like now everyone wants to monetize even their discussions on Commodore 64 or automotive repair / have behind absolute control or paywalls /etc.

While I agree with what you are saying, I think audiences crave the falsehoods strongly, regardless of how the sausage is made. And I know that the technology itself may be regulated for normal consumers, while ‘professionals’ will use their wealth to get another set of technology that does it better. Much like in the USA prostitution is generally illegal, but filing sex for pornography media is legal. There really are not very many preaching to level the playing fields on media production hardware. And if you look at the energy requirements and cost of a high-end GPU just as run-time, you can start to get the sense of how a $15,000 camera is going to be able to do post-production that a consumer smartphone won’t have.

James Joyce has entered the chat

if I need a Chrome based browser

I don’t think Chromium has “gone bad”? They make a WIndows and macOS build too, not just Linux: https://chromium.woolyss.com/download/en/

Bad Dog seems to have a YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/@BadDogDC but they aren’t off to a good start. All the songs they uploaded are marked as YouTube Kids which means you can’t even playlist them.