Given that half the games are anime waifu sims these days, I can only imagine what horrors you'd unleash letting people link to their profiles on anime waifu mastodon instances.

Actually no, I don't have to imagine it since I've seen the horrors with my own eyes.

I mean have you seen gamers?

I don't think their devs are having a hard time figuring out how to support different instance names...

They probably just wanted a handful so they can slap it in a regex and be done with it.

idk how you spare the effort.

When you've been building networked systems for longer than JavaScript has existed, it no longer takes effort to spot design choices that put users at risk. When you've watched endless vulnerabilities be exploited over the years, it's not paranoia, but a real-world problem that impacts real people. At that point, the flaws are impossible to responsibly ignore.

Spreading awareness and showing people how to build safer systems does sometimes get tiring, but I think it's important.

It's simple, when you understand how shaky the foundation of all digital infrastructure is it's impossible to not be paranoid.

I actually gave up recently for my mental health of all things. Turns out accepting being tracked in just about everything I do but also getting all the benefits of living in the future, without the effort spent on mitigation, is a huge relief. Does Google know my daily routine? Yes. Did they when I had the tin foil hat on? Probably also yes.

It's not paranoid to complain about the unnecessity of javascript when all you want to do is read a public text post on a social media platform. I have javascript disabled on some browsers, and it's annoying to have to whitelist a site that really shouldn't need it.

It also does have an API which can be used by apps, including alternate frontends which don't use JS.