towerful

Great, use cloudflare or any number of other ddos mitigation services. Or get a larger peering connection and eat the ddos.

It doesn't.
Have you ever been ddos'd? I haven't.
I imagine if it happens, I'll just switch off the VM.
If it's actually a problem, then I'd see what the VM hosting company recommends. Ultimately they will have something in place so that if my VM gets targeted they can isolate it.
My sites get denied service. Oh well.

I've never had anything get so popular that I actually need the tooling that cloudflare offers. I've never had anything targeted in a way that cloudflare would protect against.

If that is actually a vector in your security and reliability analysis, then yeh. It's probably the right tool for it.
And there are other competitors than just cloudflare if you actually need the protection, which should each be considered.

And a VPS and any number of tunneling systems for the remote reverse proxy.
Rathole is my goto. But SSH forwarding, wireguard... There's plenty, even ones that will entirely manage the reverse proxy on the VPS.

Yeh, we need c++ss

And yet the guy on top technically finishes first

"think of it as an extra safety restraint"

Mumble was awesome. It probably still is, to be fair

Discord is going to be the age-verification-service for gaming, if they can get laws to follow fast enough.
They have the gaming community, they have chats/friends/DMs/VoIP.
If they release a dev toolkit that implements in-game chat, in-game VoIP, friends list and age verification... All while not being tied to steam? Imagine if they offered a system for in-game purchases and gifting purchases to friends (oh yeh https://gam3s.gg/news/discord-adds-in-app-purchases-for-in-game-items/ )
They are positioning themselves to offer a huge range of features, easy navigation of legal minefields, and no distribution-platform tie-in - while also offering out-of-game functionality of all of that (likely leading to player retention for games that leverage it properly).

They are positioning themselves to be a market-leader/industry-standard for game social networks. Everyone that has ever used discord is the product they are selling, and they are now releasing the features and tools for companies to leverage that.

I see :)

I'd be interested in seeing end-to-end details of the entire funding pipeline.
But it's pretty obvious. America and Russia.

https://www.ft.com/content/f8696da1-5fe6-4218-be9c-5309bd9a6ae5

(Older, but it's stupid to think anything has changed. Maybe reduced cause of Russia's fucked economy).
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/russia-ukraine-war-putin-europe-far-right-funding-conservatives/

No doubt none of these specific links have concrete evidence. I'm sure I searched for what I wanted, and found what I want. No doubt influenced by the echo chamber in which I live.

Like I said, I'd love to see the evidence.
But I have no doubts that America and Russia are interfering with European politics.
It seems stupid to think otherwise, considering how vocal Musk has been about the subject.

I think this is the a major step in discords plan to be a service to games (ie business-to-business).
They are positioning themselves to be an age-verifying platform for games, alongside in-game chat, in-game VoIP, in-game store and game community.

At some point, games are going to have to require age verification. It's just the way the "protect the children" bullshit is going (instead of "enable the parents to raise their kids", which is far to socialist and progressive) Or game shops will. But if you don't sell your game, that bypasses game shops. And if cracks can bypass purchasing, then... It's on the game to comply with laws.
If there is in-game chat: needs age verification.
If there is in-game voip: needs age verification.

At some point, discord is going to roll out this massive suite of dev tooling that "just works" for devs creating multiplayer games with voip, chat, in-game purchases, gifting in-game purchases to friends, friends lists, out-of-game chat, game communities etc. while also offering age verification.
It already does a lot of that.
They are getting ahead of the age verification laws so they offer a very simple path for developers to "just pay discord" to skip a HUGE legal minefield, and get a bunch of functionality for whatever cut discord decides .

I hear the 3rd best is tomorrow, and that fits with my energy levels