Also read the start of the comment. See this?

> as much as I think Piracy Shield shouldn't exist

First off, the immediate appeal to Vance and Musk is embarrassing. I believe he knows he's technically in the wrong for not abiding to the law, so gathering the sympathy of the "freedom fighters" of the web is all he can do. But the funniest part about this tweet are the "threats" he makes towards Italy.

> In addition, we are considering the following actions: > ... > discontinuing Cloudflare’s Free cyber security services for any Italy-based users

He phrases it to be as if the free tier is a favor Cloudflare does to the world, as if it's not obviously a loss-leader designed to get more people into the Cloudflare ecosystem.

> Removing all servers from Italian cities

This is my favorite by far. Does he think that this will start a popular uprising? My take is that when Italian customers notice their ping going up by 10x because all their traffic is now routed through France, they will switch to BunnyCDN, Fastly or any of the dozens of CDNs that do have servers in Italy.

In this political climate, Cloudflare siding with the current administration's general line of "we're Americans, our economy is strong so we're above international law" sends a message I don't think they fully understand. I hope this ends up as being a push for independent European cloud.

I don't particularly like client-side paid features, but:

- The client is fully FOSS, you can just patch the license check out. In fact, there are some forks on GitHub that do just that and provide binaries, and the authors don't seem to care, they even acknowledged them on Twitter (https://x.com/b3logos/status/1928366043094724937).

- There are plugins to sync without a paid plan

This works out quite well for them: if you choose a fork or a sync plugin, you don't get the same support that paying users do, so many users still end up buying a license. But you don't need to, which makes the whole thing not user-hostile.

I have bought a one-time license myself, and I'm very happy that I'm supporting the development of a FOSS project.

It does run, but I feel like it's more of a prototyping tool, or a tool for building internal apps. It's kinda slow, graphically inconsistent with the rest of Android, and it has little to no support for features like foreground services, the camera, and more.

I really hope they can improve, but with limited resources and funding, and such a wide scope, I'm not sure if they will ever be ready for more complex projects. In any case, best of luck to the devs!

Don't you think they would have kept the video up if they really had a "mission to sow dissent in free western countries"?

Do you have any source that can prove this kind of video exists not because people like dark humor, but because of a deeper conspiracy?

The SponsorBlock and DeArrow argument only works some times: clickbait and sponsors can be an indicator of poor quality (see Linus Tech Tips), but they aren't always: even Tom Scott video thumbnails and titles used to get DeArrowed, and I bet no one here would argue that Tom Scott used to push low quality content.

In order to get a vaguely usable stock YouTube, you need to install at least UBlock, SponsorBlock, No Translation, and arguably DeArrow as well. And this only works for browsers, many people will cope with their mobile YouTube experience being hell on earth. Why do all this when you can get an alternative cross-platform client like GrayJay with all the same features (minus DeArrow for now), which works out of the box, has more privacy, and won't be completely useless the next time Google decides to shift things around a bit?

Same goes for Windows: you'll see people who go to great lengths to disable telemetry, remove Edge and sponsored content, often having to run random scripts from the internet with administrator privileges, just to have everything reset on the next Windows update. Remember how Windows users made fun of Linux users for having to open a command line for installing a browser (which isn't even true)?

I could go on: you can get Firefox and spend hours tweaking about:config to disable the anti-features, or you can get one of the dozen forks with the same patches pre-applied, yet some people will still defend the stock experience with their lives.

You can claim what you want about freedom of speech being guaranteed in the USA, but the reality shows that it only applies for some people.

https://www.nordlys.no/mads-sin-drommereise-til-usa-spolert-...

It's cool that it uses email, but it's also not. Email is a notoriously painful standard to run a server for. I have ran a Matrix and Mastodon server, and I'm still running a BlueSky PDS, but I've never even tried to run an email server, since I know I'll get blocked the moment I try it for having a residential IP, and that it's a lot of work.

So most people will be stuck with commercial providers, with the largest happening to be Google, which needs users to set up an app password for DeltaChat to work. You've already lost most users at that point. Other large providers don't work or require setups: https://providers.delta.chat/

Then there's ChatMail relays, which are supposedly interoperable with email, but from the documentation it's very unclear to what extent that is. Not to mention that the possibility of them getting blacklisted by mainstream providers is very high, as they do text message analysis which doesn't work on encrypted blobs.

At this point, I have to ask: is email the right tool for the job? With all these drawbacks, it seems it would have been better to go with another standard, written from scratch.

> According to a February 2022 report by the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS), a social credit "score" is a myth as there is "no score that dictates citizen's place in society" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

There are a gazillion clients for Android, mostly forks of Conversations implementing slightly different extensions, but like the upstream they fail at being enjoyable to use. I have not found a decent desktop client as of my last attempt.

I seriously think that XMPP is one of the best examples of why the "write protocols, not apps" approach has failed. Without an actual, complete and cohesive reference implementation, that others follow with theirs, there will always be a fragmentation like this, which will always ruin any attempt at mainstream adoption.

> not speculative

So it is speculative, right? Even your comment is just speculation.

I then went on to try https://biz.nf, and I think they belong to the same category - free web hosting, provided by actual profit-driven corporations as opposed to orgs/collectives such as NeoCities, which seems to be stuck in time. Both continue to work in 2025, neither offers free HTTPS (which means those sites won't even open by default on most modern browsers), not much is known on who runs them, and neither has upgraded their graphics in (tens of?) years. But they do work.

I still have my Biz.NF account. I don't actually use it - the lack of SSL is a deal breaker for any potential serious use one might have - but I log into it from time to time, when I'm feeling nostalgic. There's something so charming about it, it's hard to explain. It might be the early 2000s web design aesthetic, with the cartoonish clip-art icons, heavy shadows and gradient backgrounds. Or it might be the memory of those times, when I thought that anything I could think of, I could develop, with my silly little free web hosting account.

I can't convince myself on how these sites still exist. Sure, they provide abysmal specs for the free tier, and they're quick to ban everything that they think is abuse. But they have staff, including the support agent who kindly explained to 13y/o me that the free tier doesn't allow your PHP scripts to fetch external resources, and the people taking care of the actual servers, providing support for the latest PHP versions, and more.

I'm fully convinced that these hosts will not be here in 10 years. It simply can't work. Biz.NF has paid services, but they're overpriced when compared to almost everything else. You can't convince me they're much profitable. Even their free hosting offerings are outdated - most of the comments here are talking about better alternatives. Biz.NF has recently discontinued the free website builder, without announcing any replacement. FreeWHA runs entirely on outdated software, and most features have been "coming soon" since before 2017.

They're probably the sites that best allow people to experience the "dead mall vibe" on the Internet (alongside Decentraland, for Folding Ideas fans). To me they feel like they're just going by inertia, surviving off of a handful of paid subscribers, some of which have probably forgotten they're subscribed at all.

At some point, some random guy is going to decide they can't be bothered to keep the lights on anymore - as little as that electricity bill might cost - and that will be the end for this corner of web history. And just like when I read in the news that the mall where I used to go as a child was closing down, I'm going to be sad when I receive the email of Biz.NF's end of service.