ChiefestOfCalamities

It sounds to me like you weren't the only person the company was screwing with. Once everybody started comparing notes, that company was dead in the water.

Hit the nail on the head. Elon and spez don't need to keep anywhere close to all their users for this to be a success. From a business perspective, they could lose a quarter of their users and still come out stronger if it means they've monetized the rest. Then add in the additional bonus of getting rid of all your ideological, principled troublemakers, leaving you with a platform full of high quality, addicted users that are easy to take advantage of. I don't like it, but it really is a sensible strategy from a monetization perspective.

The people you're (justifiably) worried about aren't leaving Reddit because of the blackouts. The Reddit experience and content haven't disappeared- all you have to do is switch to subs that didn't go dark and post/consume content there instead. Eventually the protesting subs will be reopened under more subservient mods and everything will go back to "normal".

People (like me) who are exploring entirely new communities right now are the ideologically motivated ones who don't like what Reddit leadership is doing and want to find a new place without that kind of toxicity. Based on my very limited experience so far, that seems like the kind of person who would fit in here.

I don't see why we can't just stay on the fediverse, enjoy threads as long as meta wants to play ball, and then wave goodbye when they decide they don't want to federate anymore. Nobody's forcing anyone to move from the fediverse to meta, and I think the current demographic here is unlikely to volunteer for another walled garden experience.

Worst case scenario is we end up right back where we are now- a niche community prioritizing independence and decentralization.

Depends on where your workstation is. If somebody breaks into my house and is in my office 10ft from where I sleep, them seeing my passwords is the least of my concerns.

FWIW, I do use a password manager. But writing things down offline isn't that bad, depending on the situation.

The problem was that they were grandfathering existing users without notification every time they increased their PBKDF2 iterations. I think the current recommendation is 100,100 iterations, and LastPass was implementing that for new users. But it wasn't updating that for existing users, resulting in some having as few as 5000 iterations, making that user's encrypted data much easier to crack. You could change the iterations in the settings, but that required knowing that you needed to do this, and LastPass should have either changed it automatically or notified users that they needed to change it.

I was paying LastPass to be the security expert so I didn't have to learn all the ins and outs of data encryption, and they failed at that task.