Why BitcoinTalk forums suck:

--Cloudflare sees your password.  People invest so much time here to own nothing.

--Tor & VPN restrictions (that require payments) for a borderline illegal grey market

--Google Captcha for Tax Evasion & Bitcoin Mixing

--Payments for Ads in Signatures, based on the quantity of posts, leads to low quality spam

--There's no sense of community like Nostr has, just calling each other scams.  And the criteria for not being a scam is having spent a lot of time using this Cloudflare password to spam.

--People don't even trust the escrow moderators.

--Applicants to job ads often have no presence or website besides BitcoinTalk.  Oh you're a web dev with no website?

Anyone who is self-employed should be self-hosting a VPS.  If your only presence on the internet is Cloudflare seeing your password, Gmail, and Telegram... then you're basically homeless. 

 What do you mean by “self hosting a vps”? 

 VPS is a virtual private server, or a tiny cloud, 1 or 2 CPUs and RAM.  Then you can host services like your website, your email, your files on the cloud, your private messengers such as Matrix or XMPP.  So then you are in control 

 Thanks for the clarification. I wondered if you meant hosting directly on vps (cloud) or hosting on own hardware. 

 My only presence is my npub, codeberg and xmpp/email. I don't have to worry about cruft, hosting, my pseudonymity, impersonation. This npub is my canonical public face, you know youre talking to me because what I say signed by my nsec.