I think he should consider getting out of the indie blog hosting business. It’s only going to get worse as the internet continues to decay and he can’t be making all that much off the service.
That's an easy thing to say if it's someone else's time that's being wasted and not your own. But there may not be a path back to the internet under which this project was conceived.
It could be like staying on Twitter and Reddit after their respective declines. You're only suffering an opportunity cost for your own time and preventing the internet from evolving better alternatives.
No way. People deserve expression and to have a place that's THEIRS where they can foster a community. Much is learned. Playing battle bots is fun at the sysadmin level (for me), maybe not so much for others, but to have a place where people express themselves, and have THEIR place outside of the walled gardens such as social media, AND they protect it from the bots?
That's the battle, and expression, people, their interests, and their communities are worth fighting for. _ESPECIALLY_ in this day and age where botnets/scrapers are using things such as Infatica to mask themselves as residential IP addresses, and mimicking human behaviors to better avoid bot detection.
There's a war on authenticity, people's authentic works, and the reverse: determining if a user is authentic now adays.
His persistent efforts are the reason I pay for Bear Blog. I think he should fight for the chance to come out on the other side of whatever future we’re heading towards.
As much as I love the service and enjoy the transparency, I do wonder about the future of smaller operator services as the Internet continues it's descent into a giant mess :-)
Indie blog businesses are great for the health of the human internet, and I don't think surrendering preemptively will help things get better.