It’s an initiative to stop game companies (EA, Ubisoft, Blizzard etc) from being able to decide if you can play a video game that you’ve bought. The example used is for the video game “The Crew” which was an online-only racing game. After the servers were shutdown by Ubisoft, the game that many people bought became unplayable.

What StopKillingGames wants, is that any company that publishes / develop games provide a way for people who own the game to continue playing it indefinitely. This would most likely come in the form of a game server that could be run by any owner of the game, and shouldn’t be a requirement that publishers / developers run the servers forever as that would be unsustainable.

Someone was testing a program they made that links Lemmy / Mastadon (ActivityPub) to other services, think threads or Reddit.

When they ran the program it created all the dummy accounts and published it to the Fediverse making it look like a lot of new users joined.

Reading the article, they collect the data necessary to federate with an instance. If you or I were to run our own instance we would have access to the same data.

If they were to do anything with that data that they don’t have permission to do, like selling it. They would be in breach of the GDPR and fined 4% of their global annual income, and as we’ve seen with Apple, it’s not profitable to have two wildly separate versions of your product.