I’ve been thinking about this over the last few days, and I want to say I think I agree that right now doesn’t feel like the right time to open t/suki to the public. I don’t think I want to rule it out indefinitely, but we can revisit that conversation later.
On the topic of actually going the other direction, however…
…I surprisingly found myself open to the idea of making the forum only accessible if you were logged in as I thought about it more. However, I don’t really want to do it because it goes against one of the reasons I wanted to make a forum in the first place. I’ve found that as Discord has expanded its reach, when you’re looking for information or help on something you now sometimes run into a “join our discord” call to action instead. So much information gets locked behind closed doors.
I don’t want t/suki to become another place like that, where knowledge, wisdom, and advice is only available to those willing to make their presence known in a chat room and then trudge through disorganized chat logs. Being able to explore and learn freely by reading forums I wasn’t a part of was one of the things I loved about the internet growing up. It let me decide which forums I wanted to be a part of too, because I only needed to make an account if I wanted to post.
I think there’s a balance we can achieve here though. We could install Anubis to require a proof of work before the site is accessed, to make it costly for scrapers to read our website but still keep the forum available for everyone to view. Proof-of-work also comes with its downsides, as it could become an impediment to people with computers that aren’t very powerful. However, I believe Anubis handles this situation well, at least as far as the current arms race is concerned.