This seems too black and white a prognosis. I think it's not a popular method of funding development because the sponsorship/patronage method seems like it already does a better job of providing stability without making a transactional relationship.

Why don't you have the program download the entire text to save locally and then fetch the local files?

Introduction

I’ve written quite a lot of free software in my life. Most of it was from scratch: projects I started myself. So I get to choose where to host them – or rather, I have to choose where to host them.

These days, all my projects are held in Git. And mostly, I put them in ‘bare’ git repositories on my personal website.

I don’t use any git ‘forge’ system layered on top of Git, like Gitlab or Github, which automatically makes a bug tracking database for each project, and provides a convenient button for a user to open a merge request / pull request. I just use plain Git. People can ‘git clone’ my code, and there’s a web-based browsing interface (the basic gitweb) for looking around without having to clone it at all. But that’s all the automated facilities you get.

Occasionally this confuses people, so I thought I should write something about it.

Discussion with the author https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham/114111520633445984

That's not an affiliate link that's an anonymous tracking link.

These suggestions are essentially the same as other privacy and libre focused recommendations.

You're right. I got lazy.

DFRA

I'm talking about posting on their website a link to alternative social media accounts.

I'd make a blind bet on that over Matrix for suitability.

In that case we could all just use email.