You’ve mixed copyright and patents together and confused yourself a bit. Game mechanics cannot be copyrighted, but they can be patented. Some game component designs can be copyrighted as well, and even trademarked.

There are many, many, many game mechanics and features which have been patented, such as in-game chat, minigames on loading screens, arrow pointing to destination, and so on. Game studios have to license those features from the patent holders if they wish to use them.

Some random company even owns a patent for the concept of sending and receiving email on a mobile device. The entire system is a fucking joke.

I think that would be an example of a wildly unpopular change, yeah.

Not sure what you mean - I don’t think most of the people still using Firefox are going to switch to a Chromium based browser any time soon, I can’t speak for everyone of course but it feels like Firefox users tend to have an ideological objection to Google having a monopoly on web browsers.

It’s always worth trying a different browser when you have issues on websites - there are a lot of things that can be different beyond the layout and javascript engines - cookies, configuration, addons, etc. Yesterday I noticed a big difference between Chromium and Firefox in that even if you hard-refresh on a HTTP/2 connection, Chromium reuses a kept-alive connection, and firefox doesn’t — I would totally argue that Firefox’s implementation is more correct, but Chrome’s implementation will lead to a better experience for users hard-refreshing.

The moment that Firefox goes too far, it’ll immediately be forked and 75% of the user base would leave within a few months. Their user base is almost entirely privacy-conscious, technologically savvy people.

This is ahistorical. The original Lemmy instance is lemmy.ml, and it was hugely tankie literally from the beginning - the .ml referring to marxist-leninism, years before Reddit’s API changes. It’s nothing to do with people being banned from Reddit, it’s just that the concept of a federated message board platform was appealing to communist software developers, who created and guided the project. If anything, the anti-tankie sentiment which is popular on instances like lemmy.world is what came to lemmy after the Reddit exodus.

Tankies have never really been regularly banned on Reddit in any real extent.

Some people have an ethical objection to advertisements.

Video hosting is one of those things which can probably never be done profitably. But that’s okay, lots of things can’t be done profitably but still exist.

The internet used to be almost entirely run by passionate individuals with no thought towards how they’re going to make any money.

The long-term solution is probably something like inter-connected peertube instances provided by some of the big video creators with lots of patrons, and if someone gets big and starts making patreon money, they can make their own instance and start hosting their own videos.

You wrote:

I find AI a HUGE productivity boost, in search

Then when pushed, you walk it back:

search isn’t benefitting from the use of AI

Why make your initial comment of support if you just walk back on it? Got some money riding on it or something?