Mods. I know that’s not really helpful, but it really is how many of us continue to enjoy it. That said, there are still things you can do to spice up your gameplay on vanilla. The biggest one is this- try a different playstyle. Archery is incredibly effective, so try making a character who absolutely refuses to use one because his whole family was slaughtered by a rogue sentient bow that laughed at him while it did it. Recruit different companions and try to keep them alive in different situations. Be an absolutely evil sonofabitch and kill everyone the game allows you to. Try Oblivion, for a similar, but distinctly different (and in my opinion, slightly superior, despite Skyrim’s many advantages) experience. Or, most simply, stop trying to get blood from a stone, and put the game down until the itch actually returns, not until you feel like it should’ve. Best of luck to you.

Every new account isn’t a bot, though. We don’t have real numbers to work with yet.

I don’t plan to use reddit anymore if I can help it, other than to find specific answers to things. I’ll no longer just browse. That said, up until now I exclusively used RiF. I refuse to touch the official app, and use old.reddit and ad blockers.

There is actually an advantage to being part of a larger instance if you want to browse everything, actually. An instance is federated with another when a user from Instance A subscribes to a community from Instance B. The more users in an instance, the more people to subscribe to other instances, federating that instance with more instances for all users.

Yes, but reddit can undo it. A little while back, /r/KotakuInAction was nuked by the head mod, who had not been an active moderator for years. He deleted all content and set the subreddit to private. However, since his actions were malicious and the rest of the mods could only watch since he was above them in the mod order, reddit admins removed him from the mod list and restored the subreddit to before the mod went crazy. This is likely the same logic they’ll use to reopen the subs, only it doesn’t work since it’s not the work of one rogue mod, but the mod team as a whole.

The only reason federation wasn’t working was because they had to turn on CloudFlare protection just to keep the site from crashing. That interfered with federation. Assuming they’re able to upgrade enough to handle the traffic, they’ll federate as easily as lemmy does.

He even claims that around a thousand subreddits went dark. It was 8,000. Hundreds are already pledging to stay dark indefinitely, including huge ones like r/aww and r/videos.