I’ve always appreciated your competence and diligence in setting a good example of responsible hosting without resorting to shitty technofeudal fiefdoms like Cloudflare. Nice to see you are standing your ground and not selling the users out (unlike lemmy world and many other boot licking hosts).
I must say there is a notable side-effect to this. Since mbin does not have a cross-posting feature, I have been cross-posting by creating a link post to my original post from other relevant magazines. Now all of those links are unreachable to outsiders. To outsiders, I polluted their magazine with access-restricted links.
I can think of only two workarounds:
- Make the original post on a publicly open forum, then link to that from other forums. This means the original post can never be on Fedia (which has the side-effect of reducing fedia publicity); and/or
- Copy/paste the payload of the original msg into the cross-post.
Fix 1 is impossible for existing past threads. Fix 2 is tedious and it’s a maintenance burden esp. if a post needs edits or updates. Fix 2 is also problematic because if I withold the original link, users cannot find other discussions that are scattered; but if I supply the original link, then non-Fedia readers cannot reach the OP anyway.
That will mean we don't show up in search engines and whatnot, which for some will considered a good thing and will likely cause others to leave.
Worth mentioning that paywall sites handle this by giving crawlers special treatment. I’m not necessarily suggesting that though.
There is a remaining problem related to the login form. Calls to the login page are breathtakingly expensive,
The login form loads must be through the roof because whenever a non-fedia user follows a cross-post into fedia, they are redirected to a login form which did not happen before.
There would be some relief if Mbin would implement a cross-post feature that automatically copies the OP text into the body, which would cut down on the number of visits. At the same time, I’ve always considered that a sloppy approach because edits are not sychronised. So in principle the threadiverse probably needs a smarter API specifically for cross-posts.
The use of 3rd-party clients would obviously give relief on the login form loading. But I have not found any decent 3rd-party clients for Lemmy or [km]bin - (perhaps because I’m fussy… I could really use a text UI in linux that stores content locally).
Belgium has an open data law obligating the state to make available to the public generally all information that the state has, with some reasonable restrictions w.r.t private info about individuals. Legal statutes themselves would obviously have to be openly accessible under that law. That law was even used to force publication of train routes and schedules. I’ve not read the law but I guess it’s likely sloppy about what constitutes “open”, because the state’s own website is access restricted (e.g. Tor IPs are blocked).