As a user of old.reddit I really don't even find this interface to be much different. It really seems to be similar. Some of the issues I see as confusing comes to the federation specific things. As someone new to federation but from a technical background even I am finding that aspect confusing. So I imagine for people less tech savvy it would be an even harder learning curve. The idea of going to a completely separate domain, but being able to still subscribe to their community via the dbzer0 account is a totally different kind of concept and the UI can make it a bit complicated.

But overall using one specific instance feels very similar to the old.reddit UI if not slightly nicer in my opinion.

If they do reject it I guess I just VPN to a Europe location and request it. Since reddit doesn't have you select a country for your profile I'm not sure how else they can deny the request except purely by IP address geolocation.

Thanks :). Not sure I'll remember to do the update as their page says it can take up to 30 days to get the results. But I am definitely curious to see what kind of data they have logged on me over the decade (plus a bit) that I have had my account on reddit.

I gave it a try yesterday and it let me submit the request from Canada. No idea if they will come back in a month and say "Only Europe sorry"

I agree with that, however there is also some value to having the posts there. For example some local subreddits that I moderate I'd love to be able to kind of "mirror" the posts occuring on reddit as often times things being posted are events, local news, or local recommendation style things. I don't want to have to manually repost all the news articles that people post for example.

It would be kinda neat to see a browser extension that could integrate these Lemmy communities in a "cross-post" style manner like Reddit does. Allow you to view both reddit and lemmy discussions based on the link.

I found in the beginning it may be a bit hard simply because it takes some time. What I mean by this is that the initial ratio you start with will allow you to download a small amount of content to begin seeding and earning "gold" from. You basically just have to keep seeding more as you get more room in your ratio to grab more without getting too low. I found that once you rank up and can get VIP from your gold you are pretty set on the site and never have to worry. I got to a point pretty rapidly where I no longer have to worry about my ratio.

I'd say MAM also helped me get into other private trackers and now I am some of the harder to get into ones like GGN.

Yep, I've had issues searching for some things on Google before where I could tell Google was adding a political leaning bias, censoring things, or just deranking certain content heavily. So I thought DDG would be a good one to try out with the same searches but I still found it had similar issues. I brought out Yandex and was easily able to find the results I was looking for on the top results.

Now I am sure Yandex also censors stuff too, but its definitely my go to if I'm trying to find things on certain political topics from views Google disagrees with, or for finding things related to piracy.

Honestly getting a bit sad how not even something as generic as a search engine can be free from political censorship.

Well I think you can see with things like Denuvo that anti-piracy techniques can kinda work. They don't stop people from eventually getting it, but with how inpatient many people are, having to wait 14 days for the new Harry Potter crack can be quite effective to stifle piracy. My hope is that crackers continue to learn methods like Denuvo uses to be able to better crack them.

The governments end up caring because the corporations light a fire under their asses to do something about it (with phat $$$ of course)

Yeah I uploaded a textbook before to Sci-Hub and lib genesis. Feels good when I can't find a textbook but can get it uploaded to give back to the community.

I've had almost zero issues finding what I need from MAM. I do wish they had more textbooks on there, but I guess that is not really their area. However I don't recall ever having any issue finding any content I was looking for on MAM. Also one of the easier private trackers to get into via an interview.

Are these GDPR requests something you can make outside of Europe? I'd love to try and help confirm it. Definitely not the oldest reddit account out there but I'm around 12 years there. Either way I think Lenny is the way to go. One issue I do with Lemmy though is the issue many subreddits have where they can become echo chambers. Especially with essentially one person having control over a swath of different communities.