This has no relevance to politics and I’m not attacking anything by saying forcing sign ups is a barrier to content or that you’re wrong about it having anything to do with bots, you dork.

No it isn’t, they are letting bots scrape the articles just like every other news site for that sweet, sweet SEO. Why do you think the archive.is link has the full article?

Still a wall between people clicking the link and the content.

Though they seem secure behind a paywall, swiping content creators’ explicit photos and videos from subscription-based platforms such as OnlyFans, Patreon, and Fansly is relatively easy. People can download third-party apps for the task, and if those don’t work, a few basic coding tutorials can teach them how to surpass anti-theft technology. These images and videos then proliferate across the internet, on niche forums, Reddit threads, Discord servers, and Telegram groups with tens of thousands of participants. Today, a growing legal consensus considers this activity to be sexual abuse.

I think you deliberately skipped this part.

Damn, I can’t believe I accidentally sexually abused Kate Winslet by pirating Titanic.

You’re sure you wouldn’t rather switch to moonlight: vendor lock-in edition?

If Netscape had a large paid install base and still failed because a free browser became ubiquitous, what makes you think doing that now when the free browsers are already ubiquitous would work? Especially when it also has to compete with what is essentially already what you’re describing, Librewolf (or just Firefox + Arkenfox).

I don’t have anything publically accesible on my network (other than wireguard), but if I did I’d just put whatever it was on its own VLAN, run a wireguard server on it, and use a VPS as a reverse proxy that connects to it.

I only use unprivileged LXCs and everything I host on my network runs in its own LXC, so I’m not really worried about someone getting access to the host from there.

I was also using it then and most people hated it at the time. People generally saw it as useless DRM they had to install to play the games they had already paid for. The biggest complaint was needing to install it and register Counter-Strike to get the 1.6 update.

This gif comes to mind:

I like the workflow of having a DNS record on my network for *.mydomain.com pointing to Nginx Proxy Manager, and just needing to plug in a subdomain, IP, and port whenever I spin up something new for super easy SSL. All you need is one let’s encrypt wildcard cert for your domain and you’re all set.