I think you are massively overestimating how many of his fans would go anywhere, and how long they tag along. I used to play a social deduction game town of Salem, can’t say I know exactly how large the playerbase was… but I’d estimate it on the lower side, probably significantly under 50k. There were a few times Pewdiepie did a video on the game, and yeah, he was a pain in the ass, because he didn’t try to learn the game, so his video was basically him trolling around in the game screaming random stuff, completely ruining things for people who wanted to play the game, and players could basically count on a few days afterwards of, having games ruined by his fans doing the same crap of course. However it certainly wasn’t millions of them, within a few days the game mostly went back to normal… with if anything a slight boost to the number of players, because a handful stuck around and actually learned the game.

and again this is with much longer ago pewdiepie… way younger fanbase, way larger more active following. Today’s pewdiepie, that’s still following, and I guess bothering to pay attention to his videos on rigging up gadgets with raspberry pi’s, and installing archlinux with hyprland, and apparently this one on getting off google. I’d imagine… the amount of people following him are going to be waay smaller than that, he hasn’t been doing gaming videos in at least a year, seems to be more of basic tech comentary and general lifestyle location things.

So in short, if he did a lemmy push, first off I’d imagine actually the blip from it being very small. Unless steam charts suddenly show 100 million new archlinux users or something, I can guess his influence today is probably pretty small, and second the type of people he’d attract are probably also drastically different than the edgy teen base we remember him for, and lastly even at his peak of popularity and immaturity, the influx wasn’t quite as big as you are thinking it is.

and then his allegedly support of nazis.

The nazi one IMO was pretty BS. Largely it came from him playing a game, and commenting that other people were trolling putting up swastika’s etc…

Which I’ll admit, he handled the criticism poorly, did mostly the wrong things because he found it more of a joke than a real thing. He rightly noted that one of the critics was JK Rowling, who he fairly pointed out had no business calling anyone such. When Charlottsville happened is when he actually gave what I considered a pretty sincere fair apology where he basically noted, "holy shit I thought I was being accused of something that didn’t exist, I didn’t realize that nazi’s are actually still so prevelant in modern society so I wasn’t taking things seriously.

Now afterwords him dropping the n bomb on a stream was pretty damn bad, though he apologized and admitted it. Still kind of falls into the fact that he’d been paid for years to join in games with a bunch of edgy teenagers, and at the end of the day if you spend too much time with a group of people, you are going to slip up and talk like them.

Again not calling him a great guy or anything, but I’d say everything in him strikes me as a kid that never grew up (because his life was basically set up encouraging him not to), didn’t understand the weight of a lot of the things he was around, and made a bunch of childish stupid mistakes.

Valid… but also have to point out he hit big as a celebrity. When you are literally raking in millions of dollars. He was about 21 when he started his channel. and bottom line is, he got views, he got likes, and it turned into real cash. Most of our jobs etc… encourage us to grow up. His job, rewarded him for catering to his base… which of were younger than him.

I mean, I don’t know of him now… he’s way older and, seems significantly less immature than he was in the past, it’s possible a good portion of his fanbase has also grown to be more tolerable.

I mean I don’t really consider him a deplorable person… He was a dumb edgy teen 15 years ago that happened to strike a cord with the overwhelming amount of dumb edgy teens on youtube, and strike it rich. I haven’t paid a ton of attention to him, but from what I saw of his linux and gadget crafting videos, it sounds like he’s grown up a fair amount from his days of scream streaming.

Exactly why on so many things it’s like… even when it looks like they are getting it, they don’t get it. Kind of like watching bluesky rising right now. Unless I’m majorly missing something here. It looks like it’s kind of open and kind of federated…

Except in a form that no one can feasibly create their own node. One change in leadership or goals of leadership away, and it can turn into the same neo nazi trash that people are joining it to get away from.

I mean if the game is in standard files on the phone… sftp server is more or or less enabled by default, or 1-2 commands to turn on in most linux distributions (“sudo systemctl enable sshd --now” would do it on distro’s that don’t have it on by default). and plenty of sftp clients available for ios and android. I’ve never used localsend, but it’s pretty explicitly cross platform, snap is default on ubuntu based ones so in their examples it would install from the single command “snap install localsend”.

Now running the game assuming it’s a made for windows one, just requires wine to be installed. Which is default on some distro’s, or a checkbox or single command to install on others, but unlikely to be a huge challenge.

I mean ethically it’s kind of in the air. Personally I only recomend pirating when there isn’t a viable FOSS alternative, and without very specific reasons IMO there’s some nice linux distro’s out there. Personally I feel so bogged down when forced to use windows for work or to help others etc… and these days you can run pretty much anything beyond certain online games that refuse to allow linux through their anti-cheat.

Now when it does come to software in general, I guess it depends on the view. IMO there’s 3 categories that make a big difference there.

Software is bad/not worth the price: Well if you believe that why use it at all.

Software is good, worth the money but you are broke: Honestly on the whole I agree with pirating in these situations… however I would actually recomend buying it when your finances allow. You should want to support products that you use and help you.

software is good, but exploitative in methods: IE say adobe with their forced subscription models etc… To me that one makes the most sense and probably agree with you.

software is good, but their anti-piracy is stupid: IE a lot of good software programs, throw in anti-piracy measures that wreck the game. IE things that require you to always be connected to a server, that may be unreliable, to access resources that are on your computer. Yeah fuck those guys, definately pirate it.