Is this response still in review?

As someone that has used ad blockers for just about as long as I have been able to, I would like to think that this is true. However, I’m not entirely sure that it is. I’ve heard that a surprising percentage of people just don’t even know that ad blockers exist. If that’s the case then they may be very well aware of what is happening. (Using made up numbers for the sake of argument since I don’t have real numbers) Like if only 5% of users use ad blockers and doubling the number of ads they show only brings that to 10% then it is certainly worth it financially. I doubt that if you were to graph that curve it would be linear - there is certainly a point where you inundate users with so many ads that even non-technical people will start learning about ad blockers. Regardless of what the real numbers are, I would be very surprised if they are making decisions this big without at least being aware of what those numbers might be. And if they can make a small amount of money indefinitely but they have evidence to suggest that they can make even more money also indefinitely then the financial motivation is obvious. Not all infinities are the same size.

How many of the reddit users are bots?

I’d also add that I wish Spotify paid the musicians better. Even relative to other platforms Spotify is pretty bad about that. Of course if you want to support the musician it’s always better to buy merch and music and stuff directly from them, but that isn’t really an excuse for streaming platforms to pay them so poorly. And I’m not suggesting that Spotify should just give the musician everything of course. They should get their cut too. But perhaps something even slightly more reasonable would be appreciated.

Apart from everything else that has been mentioned I would add that a very real factor is that every instance to my knowledge has a donation button which cannot be removed without forking the project that goes directly to the devs. Plenty of people in this post are saying things like “Wow, glad they cleared that up! I’ll definitely be giving them money” and very likely don’t have the full context. Assuming Lemmy does continue to grow exponentially it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that these devs will probably receive a large amount of money in donations from people who may not all be okay with supporting them if they were more informed. So spreading the truth about the devs and not taking their pitiful denial as absolute truth is important even if you believe in the project as a whole.

Out of curiosity, what communities are you subscribed to that entirely consist of posts that are marked nsfw that aren’t porn? Not saying you aren’t having that experience but I just can’t think of a any communities like that that I’ve come across. Certainly there will be some posts like that but losing entire communities by disabling nsfw in public?

Thanks for the link. It cleared up a slight misunderstanding that I had as well.

You should still be able to view and comment on beehaw as normal so you don’t have to miss those communities. Defederation is a one way street. So it’s just like lemmy.world doesn’t exist as far as beehaw is concerned. We can’t have any impact on their vote counts from their perspective, they won’t see our comments regardless of the instance it’s posted on, they can’t visit any communities from lemmy.world, etc. But unless lemmy.world defederates from beehaw we will still be able to view, vote on, comment on, etc anything from beehaw as normal. It’s just that you are less likely to get any sort of interaction so you are disincentivized from doing so. Technically we could still comment on a beehaw post and anyone from lemmy.world or any other instance that hasn’t defederates with us would still be able to see and reply to that comment.

Edit: for anyone reading this, the truth is somewhere in between. See the link to the post in the comment below mine to get more clarification.