I spent a lot of my time on the internet because I was lonely in my teens and these connections were exciting. I learned software dev because I was a nerd that loved math and loved the concept of building software, having complete control on how it's done. That was the concept I signed up for.

Software dev today is sitting in front of a prompt bar, sometimes checking the IDE, sometimes some DevOps, but nothing about it excites me anymore. Even hobby projects are dull because they're done in mere days. Choosing not to use LLMs has little to no reward imo.

I'm slowly moving away from software dev because the rose tinted glasses I saw the job as are shattering

Everyone says they are packing up. But most of the people I’ve seen complain either are still on the site they complain about, or left briefly just to realize that other sites aren’t any better and came back.

I stopped using Reddit after Apollo got blocked, well, I had it side-loaded for a while too with AltStore, but that stopped working

Lately I’ve found myself thinking about BBSes for the first time in ages.

Online used to feel like an actual place.

Is this a real trend or like that time everyone abandoned Twitter for Mastodon?

Mastodon is absolutely thriving. I get you want to be a contrarian but the fediverse is loaded with people who left X and never went back.

This doesn't look like a particularly thriving platform: https://mastodon-analytics.com/#:~:text=Mastodon%20Active%20...

Twitter is also still full of interesting people. From my vantage point (AI, memes, culture, current events) it's even more ahead than ever.

> A few years ago that would have sounded like giving up

I’m confused by that sentence. Giving up on what exactly?

Personal sites were always an option and yet they chose the big platform. I interpret "giving up" in that sense, giving up your preference.

Leaving a large audience platform was/is like giving up on having a large audience for your stuff.

This reads as slop to me. Added contrast containing no semantic content.

Same with:

> it changed under them

Getting really tired of proving I'm human every time I visit a website. It's about 90% of the time now.

Soon you'll have to prove you're an adult the same way to click through for cookies. Can't wait.

Don't forget having to take a picture of yourself to pass a Recaptcha check. Ideally, that'll be acknowledged as a bad idea and just go away, but we'll see.

I part of the reason is Capthas, something is needed but Capthas are a pain to use.

No, I don't think captchas are a reason people are leaving platforms, at least not in any large number. If the content of a platform is good, the (extremely slight) roadbump for people is not going to deter them.

Keep in mind that for the average person (and even the average techy), they will not even see the captcha, because they have enough tracking them across the web that it will 'autoresolve' them as a human. I only see captcha's nowadays when I am working on web scraping automation or browsing from my VPS.

Yes, I think captchas are the wrong solution. They annoy all clients, humans included.

IP+subnet based throttling on the other hand is a perfectly working solution, optionally with a proof-of-work or login requirement for intensive POST requests only. Why is it a problem if only one or requests are made per home IP? Just how bad and inefficient is the web server?

Bots are not a second clas client. They were here before AI, and they, like AI, work for humans. For the most part, they're not trolling the web autonomously. When people can't meet their goals reasonably, people look to unreasonable solutions.

IP blocking doesn't work for bots, they use residential IP addresses and make only one or two requests per IP.

[1] Proposed Amendment to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (2026-05-08) - https://www.karlbunch.com/random/website-protection-act/

Sorry but your proposal is egregious, considering your website's access can easily be restricted to your small group.

Even a $5 VM I have has an included quota of at least 1TB egress data per month, and it can handle 9,540,534 requests in a day if not much less. In practice, my egress quota is larger by virtue of having a couple of more nodes.

If you actually cared, you would not use something cheaper then AWS, ideally with zstandard compression, and a CPU efficient service.