Putting a Netflix show on DVD and selling it is absolutely illegal unless they have a distribution license provided by the copyright holder.

It would be legal after copyright expires (in the US, copyright exists for the lifespan of the author/creator + 70 years). Keep in mind that the US has stricter copyright laws than most of the rest of the world.

For other items, like physical functional items, reproductions are generally legal unless the item is patented. And it would still not be legal for the reproduction to also reproduce any registered names or trademarks associated with the original. Example: you could legally reproduce and sell knockoff Nike Air Jordans as long as you didn't use the Nike swoosh or any likenesses of the copyrighted artwork. For items that are patented, or patent pending - making and selling reproductions is illegal - and for most patented items the reproduction doesn't even have to be identical for it to be infringing, just replicating the functionality is probably infringing.

I must be completely "dull witted" then. When I first started looking into lemmy, I went to the official "join-lemmy.org" website, clicked on "join a server" and picked one of the top listed recommended results. It just happened to be a VERY small and VERY new instance. But as a completely stupid dull witted new user who knew literally nothing about lemmy, I didn't know any better.

After joining that instance and looking for communities on it, I only saw the local communities plus a few non local communities from larger instances and I legit thought that's all there was on lemmy. I mean, it was clear I was seeing the local ones, and it was clear I was seeing some nonlocal ones, who why tf would I expect that I wasn't seeing everything?

Your perspective is tainted by the fact that you know how it all works. People new to lemmy don't, and I'm telling you that the onboarding and community discovery process is dogshit. I beg you to try considering things from the perspective of a newer user.

I tried mutualaidhub.org - and found another one that is about 45 miles from me so I went to their site to check it out. From what I can tell, it's nothing more than a hyper-localized version of gofundme.com. It seems most of these things are just links to facebook groups. I don't think these things are as organized or as helpful as your original post made them out to be.

Also, for the record, I'm not actually looking for assistance. I've honestly never heard of this thing until your post and just am trying to learn more about them, what they do, who and how they help, and maybe find something I could contribute. These things do not seem like a very viable alternative to traditional social services.

That's not exactly how it's working in practice.

Sure, for the top 5 lemmy instances, that's kind of how it's working. But for all other lemmy instances, when you load their communities and filter by "all" instead of by "local", you are only seeing the communities that specific instance has become aware of (by virtue of that instance's members manually subscribing to foreign communities on foreign instances).

Since the very nature (by design) of lemmy is to be fragmented, it's almost a foregone conclusion that users of most instances will never even become aware of that the most popular foreign communities are for the topics they are interested in, without resorting to 3rd party search tools and community trackers/locators.

The very design of lemmy actually actively promotes fragmentation...fragmentation not just among the user base, but among communities of identical topics as well across different instances.

The only way it would be 'solved organically' as you say, is when fragmentation is minimized by just having a few super-massive instances -- but that seems to be counter to the fundamental ideals of lemmy itself.

Personally, I think this is a huge usability problem that needs some better technical solutions.

I only heard about them recently too so I might give an incomplete answer but

If you only recently heard about them, then why wouldn't you logically conclude that a plausible answer to your original question might be that more people don't join them because people haven't heard of them?

This seems like a no brainer so what am I missing?

People haven't heard of them.

Also, using the mutualaid.wiki resource you cited - I decided to look up what was available in my state and the only couple of groups seem to focus on Covid-19 related things....leaving me even more confused about what you're talking about.

The problem is when it's a community type that significantly benefits from synergy. Specifically - those types of communities that provide more of a Q&A type culture rather than just a broadcast type culture.

Take a software development question. If I post that question onto a small community, I probably won't get an answer. If I'm a member of a dozen small communities covering the same topic, I might have to spam that question across a dozen identical-topic communities in order to get the answer. If those dozen identical-topic communities were just one organized community with 12x the membership, that singular community would be orders of magnitude more effective...due to the synergy.

What I hate most about a lot of series is that they come up with a good beginning and a decent middle, but no end. And so if it gets popular enough they just try to coast on the decent midddle indefinitely until loyal viewers get bored and the writing becomes monotonous, millking the life out of it. So many good shows devolve into this that it's hard for me to want to invest my time into any new series.

I think mini-series is the better format where they have a defined beginning, middle, end from the start. This is essentially thd packaged format of a movie, just longer.

For me it was the AMA that was the last straw. It was so disingenuous - all the responses had been pre-written and were copied and pasted from other previously written stock, the only answered questions were cherry-picked from reddit shills, and the several dozen most upvoted questions were completely ignored and never responded to. The very concept of "AMA" is an idea that was birthed on reddit, for reddit, and the foundational core tenets of AMA were ignored and disregarded. Ignored and disregarded...is also exactly what they think of their users, subreddit moderators, and 3rd party developers.

What users are voluntarily pro-spez (and by voluntarily, I mean their paychecks aren't jeopardized by dissention)?

I have met plenty of anti-spez users, and I have met plenty of users who just DNGAF, but I have yet to meet a single actual bona fide user who is 'pro-spez'.