I don’t usually end up using a lot of bird Pokémon in playthroughs (Flying types I pick are usually flying dragons). That said I do really like the sleek design of Galarian Articuno, and I had a Fearow once that was a star team member of the one nuzlocke I ever attempted (Fire Red).

People downplay the “fringe” aspect, but it istheo most common complaint I hear, that Mastodon/Lemmy are the “crazy left wing” versions of Twitter/Reddit. And while I’m not necessarily right-wing myself, as someone who’s not far-left, in any sort of political or social discussion, yeah I kinda see it. Non “fringe” people don’t want to be on a platform where anything not “fringe” gets flamed/downvoted to oblivion, even if it’s not technically a rule that the communities are “fringe” it can feel like an unwritten rule. Then if anyone tries making a not de facto “fringe” instance everyone else defederates from it, effectively killing it before it can get off the ground. Let’s be real, there are plenty of valid reasons to defederate from Threads, but a common one I do hear is because most Threads users aren’t “fringe” enough. That’s not going to attract a lot of people to Mastodon or Lemmy itself.

The only times I allow it myself are in this case (zero legal availability) and for unofficial/fan translations of games not available in your home region/language. Nobody would be getting your money anyway, no theft of compensation/profits there. If any games do become available, though, then we should support them. The more we put our money where our mouth is for a return to market for these games, the more incentive there is for companies to bring more of them back.

Threads is already 30x bigger than Lemmy and many times bigger than even Mastodon. Mass defederation won’t be making any sort of large media news outlets. We wouldn’t have any sort of significant numbers at that point.

Basically “embrace, extend, extinguish” in a nutshell.

If Platinum was the last game you’ve played, and you are willing to pick up a Switch, Legends Arceus is a great choice. It’s set in the past of the Sinnoh region, features a somewhat decent amount of newer Pokémon, has a good story overall, and is generally agreed upon to be the best Pokémon game of generation 8. The semi-open world and ability to catch Pokemon without battling them (featuring stealth mechanics) make for unique and fun gameplay for the series. You can even complete the pokedex all on one cart without needing to trade.

If you want to pick up a “mainline” non-spinoff game, no better place to jump in than the current generation, in this case Scarlet/Violet. It’s the game with the most current stuff going on and with the most active community. Most of the complaints about it are about the graphics and framerate/performance on the Switch hardware, but many also say that despite the performance issues these are the best mainline games in the series from story and gameplay standpoints. There’s a lot of online bickering among fans who are both positive and negative on the gen 9 games, but I would say watch some YouTube or Twitch videos of gameplay preferably without commentary to see what the games are like and make up your own mind on it before paying for a Switch and the game.

Redundancy (multiple instances making communities on the same subject) is a thing that’ll happen. I’m already subbed to communities on several instances dedicated to the same subjects. That can have an advantage, though, in that communities on the same subject but different instances can provide different perspectives on the subject depending on the makeup of the community in each instance (membership, modding, etc). Don’t like the community in one instance? Unsub from that one and hop on over to another one. Having one account able to access multiple instances allows for that. It can also help if one community or instance goes down for whatever reason, there may be another community/instance open where you can keep interacting. So I don’t see the redundancy thing as necessarily a problem.