It reminds me of a story that a web developer who found out that other sites were hosting his game by linking back to his website in an iframe and using it to make money off of ads. He made a check that if any calls are being made to the game from an iframe, replace the game with an image of goatse.

https://www.pcgamer.com/websites-stole-and-monetized-a-free-browser-game-so-the-designer-replaced-it-with-goatse/

It's not that they just found out, but more that they have combed through and prepared all of the information they could legally release.

Genuine question: If the network is decentralized, how are they able to determine the amount of users on the system?

The article mentions opt-in usage reporting, but that would only indicate there's around 115 million users actively reporting that they're using it, right?

Agreed. And in a way, it is also a contributing factor to how polarizing internet-based discussion has become. Rather than show you the most cited websites for answering a political question, it's going to use its profile of "you" to show you something you're more likely to engage with.

Billy Gunn in shambles

I'm still learning the ins and outs of this place and the others, but part of me thought that was the feature of being federated. User accounts could seamlessly transfer from one instance to another.

Looking further into it, it looks like that feature exists for content, but not so much for accounts.

Progress? Either that or their site got overloaded.

The thing that helps Kbin the most is that it is, by far, the easiest to understand. Googling "Lemmy fediverse" gives a bunch of various links to other Lemmy instances, which are presented in a way as if they are separated from one another. Kbin appears as one site, one location for content aggregation. Although that "goes against the idea" of decentralization, most users are currently looking for their "one home to replace their old one home". The more users flock to one area and learn how it works, the more things will begin to take their proper shape, so to speak.