tal

There is at least one company that does provide managed Lemmy services (which makes sense, since a lot of people might want to run their own instance, but don't want to deal with security and updates and setting up x.509 certs and stuff).

kagis

Might be elest.io that I'm remembering.

https://discuss.jacen.moe/post/862

https://elest.io/open-source/lemmy

Hey dear community, we just launched today our fully managed hosting of Lemmy

We offer to do Deployment / Security / SSL / DNS / SMTP / Monitoring / Alerts / Backups / Automated updates / Handle migrations / Fully automated but with Human support :)

We deploy each instance on a dedicated VM, and we provide full root access as well if you want to customize anything.

Pricing start at $10/month (billed hourly, no contract)

Looks like there's another one at least:

https://www.knthost.com/lemmy

Get Lemmy hosting that works for you

Only $11.25/mo. Risk-free with a 14-day money-back guarantee

Those are the ones that come up in a search. They're probably hoping that the Threadiverse will grow; enough instances could make writing scripts and whatever pretty worthwhile.

I mean, I would imagine that they may well do that, but there are businesses that buy and sell social accounts. Like, the point is that a legitimate user accrues reputation. I mean, that's an important element of how humans interact with each other

provide useful information, and I give your opinion more weight and stuff. Social media tends to try to leverage that too. But when someone doesn't want their account any more for whatever reason, their reputation has value, and so it can be bought and sold.

kagis

https://redaccs.com/marketplace/

Reddit Account Marketplace: Sell Your Reddit Accounts Securely

Have an aged Reddit account you're not using? Turn it into cash. REDAccs is the safest place online to sell Reddit accounts with post karma and history.

https://www.g2g.com/categories/reddit-accounts

https://www.playerup.com/accounts/redditaccount/

Buy & Sell Reddit Accounts. Aged Reddit Accounts. High Karma Reddit Account for Sale.

https://redkarmas.com/sell-reddit-accounts/

Sell Your Accounts on REDKarmas

Looking to cash out your Reddit account? Redkarmas.com is the fastest and safest way to sell.

Submit Reddit account information in this form.

Get a real account valuation.

Contact us & Get verified by REDKarmas.

We will give you the best price we could offer.

https://socvia.com/reddit/

BUY REDDIT ACCOUNTS

Grow Your Reddit Empire

https://accsmarket.com/en/catalog/reddit

Reddit Accounts for Sale

AccsMarket offers verified Reddit accounts for marketers, businesses, and automation engineers. They are useful for engaging in discussions, promoting content, running marketing campaigns, and managing multiple accounts for outreach or growth.

So they could develop their own "fake" accounts. Or they could just buy accounts from real, actual users, step into their skin and acquire their reputation. Or they could buy accounts from people who intentionally try to karma-farm

I imagine that that's probably its own industry.

EDIT: Oh, sorry, maybe I misunderstood

you were quoting the astroturfing guy, using whatever his meaning was. I have no idea what he calls a "fake account", and I don't think that I'd consider him to be incredibly trustworthy in the first place. But he might mean that he doesn't rely on an army of sockpuppet accounts to upvote his astroturfing, I suppose.

Why are the rangers so present in post apocalyptic worlds now? Is this a cultural thing?

Fallout was inspired by Wasteland and took a bunch of elements from it (and that's why I've recommended the Wasteland series to people who want more isometric-style Fallout).

If I remember correctly, Fallout 1 and 2 didn’t have any rangers.

kagis

https://old.reddit.com/r/falloutlore/comments/j0vbrr/the_difference_between_rangers_and_1st_recon_i/

So, the initial Desert Rangers in Fallout existed in the form of a single companion in Fallout 1, Tycho, who was a Desert Ranger from Arizona. The devs confirmed this was a reference to Wasteland, the predecessor to Fallout which followed a group of Rangers keeping the peace in the post-apocalyptic deserts of Nevada and Arizona.

https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Tycho

kagis

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4g8d39gdr0o

Kimie is one of more than 3,800 in Canada who have been infected with measles in 2025, most of them children and infants. That figure is nearly three times higher than the number of confirmed US cases, despite Canada's far smaller population.

Now Canada is the only western country listed among the top 10 with measles outbreaks, according to CDC data, ranking at number eight. Alberta, the province at the epicentre of the current outbreak, has the highest per capita measles spread rate in North America.

The data raises questions on why the virus is spreading more rapidly in Canada than in the US, and whether Canadian health authorities are doing enough to contain it.

The hardest-hit provinces have been Ontario and Alberta, followed by Manitoba.

In Ontario, health authorities say the outbreak began in late 2024, when an individual contracted measles at a large Mennonite gathering in New Brunswick and then returned home.

Mennonites are a Christian group with roots in 16th-Century Germany and Holland, who have since settled in other parts of the world, including Canada, Mexico and the US.

Some live modern lifestyles, while conservative groups lead simpler lives, limiting the use of technology and relying on modern medicine only when necessary.

Ms Friesen noted that Canada has a higher concentration of conservative Low German-speaking Mennonites than the US, which may be a factor behind the higher number of cases.

I'm assuming that the older engine is written to not take advantage of newer hardware. Fallout 76 gets down to around 40 fps in some places around Morgantown Airport, for example, but Starfield stays smooth, well over 120 fps.

If there are enough people who wait until after a game has been out for some time to play it, there will be marketers targeting that group too.

They might promote the thing based on value or something other than what the latest flashy game crowd gets, but put enough wallets together and there's an incentive for someone to go after them. The astroturfing guy's shtick was that he was targeting individual communities with crafted material to try to appeal to them. PatientGamers is another community.

An outright confession of what sure sounds like blatant astroturfing—a deceptive marketing campaign that's meant to look like natural, spontaneous conversation—is probably not the sharpest move for any company that wants to attract or keep new clients.

The clients are just fine with it. This guy was off talking about it to market his company; publishers that he attracted did so because of what he was doing.

The users being astroturfed are the ones who aren't going to like it.

What the client is going to be pissed about is that the guy mentioned their actual game while trying to promote their astroturfing company:

Still, Beresnev did what he could to put space between War Robots developer My.Games and Trap Plan, telling Kotaku the intent "was to experiment with a more organic way of promoting games on Reddit—without using bots or fake accounts—and to build a new case study we could use in the future," and that mentioning the game and studio by name was a mistake.

"This was entirely our initiative and not commissioned or endorsed by My.Games in any way," Beresnev said. "We understand this was a mistake and have since removed the case study. We sincerely apologize to My.Games and the War Robots: Frontiers team for the misunderstanding and any confusion it may have caused."

https://www.trapplan.com/about-us

Trap Plan by The Numbers

We sell thousands of copies of games a month, collaborate 
with thousands of creators, work on all platforms from Reddit to TickTok

2023 Trap Plan Founded

$10M+ Sold Games

20+ Clients in 2024

The marketer in the article

as with anyone else trying to do surreptitious marketing of this sort

is in the business of making hype that is hard to distinguish from buzz. If it were trivial to identify hype, he wouldn't be in business.

Poem_for_your_sprog

https://old.reddit.com/user/Poem_for_your_sprog/

That account appears to have been inactive for the past seven months.

The clear blend of cynicism and resignation in replies to the Reddit thread about the deleted Trap Plan post clearly illustrate how widely pervasive these practices are perceived to be.

I mean, back when professional game reviewing was more of a thing, game publishers used to do things like take said reviewers on outings and stuff to influence them, give them free copies, whatever. Marketers trying to subvert information flow isn't something that suddenly showed up with social media.

the passing grade is 43/50,

They might just be randomly guessing and hoping that they'll eventually get it, and thinking that their chances are better than they are.

I think that that'd be...let's see. Say there are four possible answers for each question. So he's got a 75% chance of failing any individual question.

$ maxima -q
(%i1) load("distrib")$
(%i2) cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75);
(%o2)                       1.8188415357867314E-19

That should give the probability of failing at most 7 answers out of 50 if there's a 75% chance of failing any one.

So he's got something like a 0.000000000000000018188% chance of passing the test by randomly guessing.

His chance of failing a single instance of that test:

(%i3) 1-cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75);

(%o3)                                 1.0

Ah. He has such a ludicrously small chance of passing that Maxima can't represent it with the current floating point precision.

kagis a bit to figure out how to do this

Okay, apparently Maxima has bigfloats, but they default to only 16 digits of precision; not enough for this. This should give us 200 digits of floating point precision with bigfloats.

(%i4) fpprec:200;

(%o4)                                 200
(%i5) 1-bfloat(cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75));

(%o5) 9.999999999999999998181158464213268688894671703526026636336767389444876177016785501194817697978578507900238037109375b-1

Okay, so now chance of failing 128 tests in a row by randomly guessing:

(%i6) (1-bfloat(cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75)))^128;

(%o6) 9.9999999999999997671882834192983948674103659072385593201782461674117226992783470289641501110105148249790638571335177402867593272110042747272666144926576839664587182158166580514670324207313719393913737b-1

So then his chance of managing to get at least one success out of 128 tests in a row by randomly guessing:

(%i7) 1-(1-bfloat(cdf_binomial(7, 50, .75)))^128;

(%o7) 2.328117165807016051325896340927614406798217538325882773007216529710358498889894851750209361428664822597132406727889957252727333855073423160335412817841833419485329675792686280606086263120236298536839b-17

So he's got about a 0.0000000000000023% chance of passing at least once in a 128 random-guess-based series of test attempts (assuming, again, that each question has four multiple choice answers). That is, he could keep doing this for the rest of his life and he's virtually certain not to pass.