They’re a capitalist company trying to make as much money as they can.

Unlike publicly traded companies, Valve is not beholden to shareholders, so they, unlike most others, are in a unique position to not JUST maximize profits. I think it's okay to point at Valve as an example for other companies to be more like, because most are still worse. But obviously we can always strive for better, as well.

(Also, out of curiosity: Under a capitalist system, can you have anything BUT a capitalist company?)

Because that's not beneficial for companies. They want to make (more) money.

The only option most developers and publishers would have is to move to another store, where the cut is usually the same, with the exception of Epic Games Store. And as pointed out elsewhere, setting up and managing your own store ends up being more expensive than a 30% cut. And then you still don't have the same features as Steam.

That requirement only exists when you also offer a Steam key for the game that's being sold. So Valve is actually the good guy here: You can sell on another store, where Steam doesn't get any money, and give the user a Steam key, provided by Steam for free, and the only thing they ask is to match the price on Steam.

Don't offer a Steam key, and you can pick any price.

That is my understanding of the issue.

There is a claim by some developers that Valve was pressuring them behind the scenes ("don't offer your game for cheaper elsewhere or else we'll take it down from our store") a while ago, but I've never seen appropriate proof of it, and that was part of (an earlier?) lawsuit.

30% is the industry standard across the board, with the exception of Epic which takes 12%. However, Epic has already shown that it's ready to dump loads of money into store exclusivity deals and tons of free games, so I will argue it's for the sake of growing the number of users and developers using their platform.

But do they, or any other competitor or similar store, offer the same functionality as Steam? rtxn already mentioned some. And there's more. And then there's the fact that Valve is using all that money not only to stuff the pockets of alread rich people (not that Gabe isn't a multi-millionaire if not billionaire, idk), but actually puts it back into the industry: Their own store, Linux/Proton (you may not care, but Microsoft becoming a monopoly in PC gaming is no good), and hardware (with their Steam Deck handheld, and VR stuffs).

Steam might be the biggest player when it comes to storefronts, but it's because they've actually earned it. And they're not actively preventing other competitors from entering the scene (other than existing). In fact, they keep trying, and keep failing, and then going back to Steam.

I'm not opposed to more money going to developers, but let's not single out Steam, who (perhaps besides GOG? I am not familiar enough with it) is doing the most for users and develpers.

Great, so it's still wrong 1 out of 20 times, and just got even more energy intensive to run.

There's been a hostile takeover at Gitea and it's now run / owned by a for-profit company. The developers forked the project under the name Forgejo and are continuing the work under a non-profit. See also: Their introduction post and a page comparing the two projects. Feel free to look up more, since I haven't familiarized myself with the incident all that much myself. Either way though, maybe consider using Forgejo instead of Gitea.

I have a feeling that the people that think "cis" is a slur just don't understand what it means, or are outright transphobic.

I recently had a guy admit he might be transphobic because he "prefers actual women", and later uttered the sentence "maybe women don't like to be called 'cis women'?" and like, dude, it's just an adjective that means the opposite of trans. But how dare we imply that trans women are women?!

In the end, treating cis / cisgender as a slur is yet another way to attack trans people.

This thinking is hateful and dangerous.

Are there trans women who have previously experimented with being a femboy? Definitely.
Are there femboys that for one reason or another are actually trans but in denial? I'm sure they exist.

Is every femboy an egg? Hell no. There's plenty that are happy with their gender identity. In fact, thanks to them being able to be in touch with their feminine side, they probably know pretty well if they feel like a man or a woman. Don't push femboys to transition, but be supportive if they want to explore the possibility.

Looks like they'll be harvesting your data if you follow anyone from Threads, maybe even injecting ads. Unsure what happens to the data of people that get followed by a Threads user. A large part of the fediverse is here precisely because they want to escape corporate meddling, data-hoarding, advertising and other anti-user malpractices. There's a number of people talking about this, here's a recent post that highlights some of the things from their TOS.

Zig hasn't been mentioned yet, so I'm just going to drop that here.

I personally have enjoyed the meta-programming, the ease of integrating with C libraries, and like that it's pretty straight-forward to compile.

I think both instance admins have a valid stance on the matter. lemmynsfw appears to take reports very seriously and if necessary does age verification of questionable posts, something that likely takes a lot of time and effort. Blahaj Lemmy doesn't like the idea of a community that's dedicated to "adults that look or dress child-like". While I understand the immediate (and perhaps somewhat reactionary) concern that might raise, is this concern based in fact, or in emotion?

Personally I'm in the camp of "let consenting adults do adult things", whether that involves fetishes that are typically thought of as gross, dressing up in clothes or doing activities typically associated with younger ages, or simply having a body that appears underage to the average viewer. As the lemmynsfw admin mentioned, such persons have the right to lust and be lusted after, too. That's why, as a society, we decided to draw the line at 18 years old, right?

I believe the concern is not that such content is not supposed to exist or be shared, but rather that it's collected within a community. And I think the assumption here is that it makes it easy for "certain people" to find this content. But if it is in fact legal, and well moderated, then is there a problem? I don't believe there is evidence that seeing such content could change your sexual preferences. On the other hand, saying such communities should not exist could send the wrong message, along the lines of "this is weird and should not exist", which might be what was meant with "body shaming".

I'm trying to make sense of the situation here and possibly try to deescalate things, as I do believe lemmynsfw approach to moderation otherwise appears to be very much compatible with Blahaj Lemmy. Is there a potential future where this decision is reconsidered? Would there be some sort of middle-ground that admins from both instances could meet and come to an understanding?

I don't trust Meta/Facebook even a tiny bit. We on the fediverse shouldn't implicitly support Threads by interacting with it at all. It gives it legitimacy. It encourages users to get their data harvested. We need to stick together as fedizens and defend our values, one of which is to get away from all this corporate meddling.

The creator of Mastodon has written a blog post after, from what I know, having been in talks with Meta, who required signing an NDA. And what a coincidence, it was posted on the day Threads was launched! I'm worried about the extends of that NDA.

For example, one of the things conveniently left out of this blog post is Meta's ability to analyze every single post and user going through Threads, obviously including the ones posted on Mastodon. Sure, your IP won't be visible to them, but if someone looks at your post, profile or follows you in the Threads app, what you posted is going to them. I doubt they'll be able to resist the urge to harvest all the data they can, perhaps even illegally. Threads is not available in Europe yet. I wonder why...

For the sake of completeness, if you haven't come across it yet, some of the embrace-extend-extinguish (short EEE) worries have been outlined in this post: How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)

What happens when Threads takes off and their users demand to be able to follow and be followed by fediverse users? Especially if we don't all stick together and defederate on day one. Are instance admins going to cave in? Are users going to switch to a Meta-friendly instances, or worse, Threads itself? What happens to the discourse, if algorithms once again start to encourage people to post in ways to please it?

Think of what happened, or is happening to, Reddit. Corporations, especially these monolithic ones like Meta/Facebook, don't care about their users. They don't care about open protocols. On a good day they care about giving the appearance that they do care about these things. But really, they care about their investors. About making profit and infinitely growing. We must resist this cancer on the fediverse.