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Periodically, someone posts a link that's to a site that's paywalled, and it seems that literally every comment is a complaint about that (see #922867 for a recent example).
They're not exactly wrong, but they're also not exactly right.
Look, I post a lot of links. Probably 75% of my posts are links. I do try to take into account whether my posts are paywalled or not, and to use either bypass links or gift links if I got them from someone. I certainly want to create as few barriers as possible to someone reading a link.
But it's also so fucking easy to bypass paywalls. You can use incognito/private browsing on some sites. You can use https://12ft.io/ or https://archive.is/ and paste the link. You can use a browser/extension combo. The first few options take maybe five seconds to do, less time and fewer sats than it takes to write a comment complaining about the paywall.
(The latter just requires running good tools to begin with.)
If you're not going to engage with a link, just don't engage with it.
21 sats \ 3 replies \ @ek 24 Mar
The first few options take maybe five seconds to do
imo not on mobile though
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Fair point -- reading anything longer than two paragraphs on mobile is not fun for my eyes, so I'm on desktop/laptop 95% of the time. But I know folks have created shortcuts for archive.is on mobile (https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/81c670b532e340e38a35cc62e3e9397d is an iPhone one I just found with a quick search, and I'm seeing a bunch of likely Android ones)., though that does take advance configuration/prep.
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21 sats \ 0 replies \ @ek 24 Mar
I should just do what I said a while ago and setup a bot that uses the Internet Archive API to post links without the paywall if there's one available.
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reading articles on mobile is really crap. I don't know how people can live with that (using a mobile to do everything online). FFS mobiles are only for 2 things: pay over LN and answer wife calls. The rest is totally meaningless and useless.
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