I do wonder if this is specifically what got them, would probably take a lemmy lawyer to unpack it, but I would have to imagine if they didn’t have a patreon and basically a company, it would have been much harder for Nintendo to do anything about them. And I would also imagine in retrospect whatever money they got was not worth it when it ends like this.

I always assume when people operate services like this, that they host it in a country like Russia that’s less likely to care about takedowns by western corpos and done anonymously as possible. Even though it’s just an emulator, you would think they wouldn’t be so brazen as to have a patreon which I’m sure requires someone’s identity/billing info. They probably still could have been tracked down if they took crypto donations or something like that, but you would think that would be the first choice over putting a giant target on their backs. Patreon is obviously just gonna hand over whatever info they are asked to give when served a warrent, and so is Discord for that matter if they had any personal info on there too.

they have not blocked it and they probably won’t block it bc it involves signing in with your twitter and since it’s just an android app it’s not gonna get as big as nitter, I don’t think it’s really helpful to tell people to “just accept it” as an individual you’re not gonna be able to successfully lobby everything you follow to change to bluesky (which I think you can get rss feeds from) or masto (which you can get rss feeds from), like for example your city’s local government/services only posts on facebook and twitter, no rss, this is still useful for things like that

If you’re asking this you should probably use one to be more safe if you’re exposing stuff to the web, there are other ways of doing it including just VPNing into your home network or using a VPS or cloudflare tunnels, but using a reverse proxy manager in combo with cloudflare DNS is a good place to start and is probably good enough if you use good enough security with it: long unique passwords, two factor, security keys, etc.