What's up with Lobste.rs blocking the Brave browser?

It does this under some conditions (I haven't worked out which), but mostly it seems to give a "This site can’t be reached The webpage at https://lobste.rs/ might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address. ERR_INVALID_RESPONSE" message.

Which is probably a bug if pushcx wants to convey why they are blocking the browser (the issues are closed, so hard to let them know this)

Are there any other choices? :D

Lobster's barrier to entry is high enough (shades of gmail invitations) that in my humble opinion most people will choose the site over the browser.

Same. Brave is my browser of choice, because it's the only one that checks all of my boxes.

If a site blocks Brave, I'll just stop visiting said site. Same with pages that tell me to disable my ad blocker to view the content. No, sorry, you burnt that bridge down long ago, I'm not disabling it.

Really? The reason wouldn't matter, the specifics of the situation wouldn't matter? You just make a rule and then you don't have to think again?

I think notifying users that their browser is malware is good personally

Brave replaces their adware with their own adware..

> Gets rid of so much garbage adware.

My brother in Christ you are literally using the Blink engine. Your daily driver is the equivalent of an adware jalopy.

Instead, I don't visit the sites which drown me with ads, and subscribe to good websites directly.

No need to use harmful software.

May I suggest Firefox plus an ad blocking extension such as uBlock Origin? Enable every option, opt-in to every list and the web reverts to something a bit more palatable.

But Brave is garbage adware.

s/elite/elitist/

Their whole business model of "block ads, and then show our own" is just so gross. I'm shocked anyone was ever happy to support it.

> If I remember correctly their first scandal was them injecting their own referral link during signups on cryptocurrency platforms.

Before that they were soliciting crypto donations on behalf of creators without their knowledge or consent.

https://web.archive.org/web/20181224011529/https://twitter.c...

And as insult to injury, since it's based on the Chromium codebase, using Brave still supports Chrome's creep toward total browser monoculture, much like Edge.

Maybe they don't think injecting referral links is bad behaviour. It doesn't hurt anyone's experience, and often gives a financial bonus to both parties in exchange for creating a database record that doesn't tell anyone anything they didn't already know from the User-Agent string or fingerprinting.

"The content you see on a site may not be the content being sent" is a low-effort excuse, too: plenty of users don't want to see plenty of things that site owners want them to see, and use browsers that display what they want to see.

Yikes. Thank god Eich never got a chance to poison Firefox with this.

As I understand it, Brave added a "donate to lobste.rs" link when viewed in their browser, and then kept all the money.

If you are using Brave, confirm any donation (and maybe anything else involving money) in another browser.

The only browsers with actually good adblocking on Android are Firefox (uBlock) and Brave (on par with uBlock.)

Firefox is plain unusable on Android if you don't use an upper-range device.

Nothing else comes close, either they're out of date (Kiwi) or they're using Chrome's built-in ad blocking support (Vivaldi). Microsoft Edge has eyeo's native ABP port but there's no customizability.

I mean, the core thing they do has pissed people off: they're yet another attempt at an alternate monetization strategy for the web, but their approach do doing so is to basically forcibly insert themselves into the existing ways that websites and creators get paid, while not telling the users that the money they're collecting on their behalf might not actually be going to that site/creator (because the site isn't actually interested in having a business relationship with Brave, or they are but are still unable to get the money out)

pushcx undermines his case by mixing more and less legitimate reasons.

It's hard building a browser to be accepted widely.

Though Brave also does incredible research in security and privacy --- and actually deploys it to millions of clients.

The 5-8 settings toggles to turn off sponsored features are a small price.

Inserting their own referral codes into links was a bit far -- though with 1) explicit notification, and 2) a setting to disable it, I would find it perfectly unobjectionable.

Some of the complaints are legitimate, that brave team discusses quite clearly in GitHub issues how to bypass blocks, though in many cases this amounts to the same as bypassing paywall or registration blocks with extensions, something I presume is so standard among hn and lobsters readership alike, that its absence would be remarkable.