I’ve been noticing that forums based on Discourse are increasingly difficult for those of us using older hardware. Versions of mainstream browsers that can be installed on this laptop will not allow me to login here to post anything, rendering the entire forum read-only. And similarly for any of the other old PC hardware I own, or all but one of my androids. The problem has been discussed at Dropping iOS 15 & other old browsers in July 2025 - Announcements - Discourse Meta .
That there that Discourse is doing could be classified as Censorship under ArceusLand Law, considering that not everybody can get the latest hardware & software.
Even with modern devices I feel the forum is too slow and unresponsive (aside from needing JS to read posts). If I was to say “ideally” I would pick a no JS needed solution, but even if using JS there is no reason for this to feel as bloated and slow. Typing this reply takes seconds between me typing and all the letters appearing. In my older devices it was even worse.
They’re trying to force this on everybody. If you don’t have the authorized (And Age Gated) hardware, you’ll be blocked from the Internet entirely in about 5 years, maybe longer, but still, this is really frightening, and it’ll negatively impact F-Droid as well, since it depends on FOSS, and if proprietary hardware is mandatory for Internet access, then GrapheneOS and the like will be essentially screwed outright!