Cookies required for the website to work (like that one) are totally fine and, in fact, they don’t even have to ask you about them - if they’re not used for tracking. So no, asking each time is definitely avoidable.

There are pros to this:

If the person you blocked can’t see your posts, they can intuit that you’ve blocked them. Then, they might try and find you on other social media to harass you even further, or shift targets to someone else.

If they can see your posts, they have no idea they’ve been blocked, similar to Reddit’s shadow bans. This might make them think you’re just annoyed or rarely look at your DMs, making them invest even more time to uselessly try to contact you.

Of course, I can see the other side too, that you don’t want them to know about any (new) posts you’ve made; but it isn’t as one-sided as you seem to think it is.

Because you don’t need to have significant experience or rent a VPS in order to do that, and I can respect that. We don’t need to force FOSS developers to become proficient in everything.

What needs to happen is some kind of tool (ideally FOSS) that lets you spin up an actual forum with the same difficulty to set it up as Discord.

Huh, TIL.

Regarding your edit, that amount wasn’t the cumulated cost of whatever Limewire were distributing, that would be idiotic indeed; rather the RIAA tried to call for a ruling that somehow those guys were causing $150,000 in damages - per instance. Now the article unfortunately doesn’t state how they possibly tried to justify that number, and I can’t be bothered to research that myself. Another thing that would interest me is how the plaintiff expected them to pay with almost every dollar on Earth.

So while I don’t think this had anything to do with “lost sales”, I do agree with the possible fines and damage calculations not being fit for any sort of realistic purpose at all.

Depending on the stuffing, I might actually rather take the seat, just because it’s got armrests.