Hyperbole and other superlatives are very common forms of lying, because “everyone” knows that it isn’t literally true, so if you call it out you look like a pedant, but it still has a greater emotional impact than an honest representation of the situation, so it’s a lie that gives the desired outcome of painting your picture without the risk of reputational damage if you are caught in the lie

The price of housing

Reddit has twice in the past (2017 and 2022, I believe April 1 both times) made r/place - an open canvas where anyone with an account could place a single pixel in a color of their choice every 5 minutes. It's a fascinating social experiment, and was a lot of fun seeing images emerge, and communities spring up around coordinating efforts to make their mark. Doing it again at a somewhat random time only a year after last time is clearly an attempt to distract from the multiple reasons people are currently upset with Reddit, and it also clearly isn't working, judging by the general tenor of anti-spez (Reddit CEO's username) sentiment

Data privacy isn’t to protect you from getting caught doing wrong things, it’s to prevent malicious actors from having the information to manipulate you. You don’t want phishers to have access to your life details that security questions ask about, even if each one is nothing to hide. You don’t want scammers to know where you went to school, who your teachers were, and what clubs you were in to build up a convincing backstory for their facade. You don’t want someone who wants to get something out of you to know who is important to you and threaten or impersonate them. It’s not about having something to hide, it’s about hiding personal details from those with malicious intent

I’d be shocked if they hadn’t heard that before

Based on a quick google search there is: https://www.frozenark.org

Cosplay is one example. There's a handful of NSFW 'cosplay' communities, one not-very-active one on blahaj, and one squatted on .world by a user who is also squatting a whole bunch of clearly NSFW communities and has never posted or commented anything anywhere, and named themselves "@Moderator." Laser cutting, Inkscape, some book fandoms are examples I was (and to some extent am) actively engaged with on Reddit where communities exist, but are far from a critical mass.

That's one alternative that would allow people to request a community exists without just making an empty community, and leave it to people who want to participate and actively moderate to create them

I'm not saying there are no good reasons to make a community without posting, but when that's all a user has ever done, and they've done it dozens of times, I have a hard time assuming they're just trying to help the fediverse thrive.

One suggestion I saw was auto-deleting communities that are still empty after a week, incentivizing new mods to upload something, not just squat names that were popular subs in hopes of I guess having some sort of power if they pick up?

Honestly no, I was mostly subscribed to smaller subs, and only the general communities here really have a critical mass. I’m definitely interacting more with general communities, but I really miss communities around niche interests.

I have hope that they will be here with time, but for now there’s a bunch of empty communities with no posts and a mod who has never posted anything anywhere, just made a few dozen communities with the names of popular subreddits, and even many the communities that aren’t in that situation have 3-4 posts and a couple dozen subscribers

Strongly agree, Skull is super simple to teach and even to make a copy, and can have great group dynamics. I don’t think it works with 2, though, but it’s small enough that having it as an option is reasonable