I get why you're frustrated and you have every right to be. I'm going to preface what I'm going to say next by saying I work in this industry. I'm not at Cloudflare but I am at a company that provides bot protection. I analyze and block bots for a living. Again, your frustrations are warranted.

• Even if a site doesn't have sensitive information, it likely serves a captcha because of the amount of bots that do make requests that are scraping related. The volume of these requests can effectively DDoS them. If they're selling something, it can disrupt sales. So they lose money on sales and eat the load costs.

• With more and more username and password leaks, credential stuffing is getting to be a bigger issue than anyone actually realizes. There aren't really good ways of pinpointing you vs someone that has somehow stolen your credentials. Bots are increasingly more and more sophisticated. Meaning, we see bots using aged sessions which is more in line with human behavior. Most of the companies implementing captcha on login segments do so to try and protect your data and financials.

• The rise in unique, privacy based browsers is great and it's also hard to keep up with. It's been more than six months, but I've fingerprinted Pale Moon and, if I recall correctly, it has just enough red flags to be hard to discern between a human and a poorly configured bot.

Ok, enough apologetics. This is a cat and mouse game that the rest of us are being drug into. Sometimes I feel like this is a made up problem. Ultimately, I think this type of thing should be legislated. And before the bot bros jump in and say it's their right to scrape and take data it's not. Terms of use are plainly stated by these sites. They consider it stealing.

Thank you for coming to my Tedx Talk on bots.

Edit: I just want to say that allowing any user agent with "Pale Moon" or "Goanna" isn't the answer. It's trivially easy to spoof a user agent which is why I worked on fingerprinting it. Changing Pale Moon's user agent to Firefox is likely to cause you problems too. The fork they are using has different fingerprints than an up to date Firefox browser.

https://tildeverse.org/

Tilde.teams and tilde.club even have outwardly facing email accounts.

We have a newsgroup server.

We have a dedicated irc server.

Member gopher/https/gemini pages.

And other services.

And each tilde has it's own focus.

Be kind. Contribute as you can to discussions.

What is gemini

https://tilvids.com/videos/watch/e1d6ed23-315a-4fc6-8d5b-6d96d51e4819

Rocking the web bloat.

https://media.ccc.de/v/mch2022-83-rocking-the-web-bloat-modern-gopher-gemini-and-the-small-internet

Be Free.

LibreWolf is next, and it's not exactly niche. I'm seeing it more and more, and LW defaults, even dropping resist settings, gets bounced by CloudFlare every time.

What do you use now instead of cloudflare?

What is MITMed?

Its kind of funny but thats how user agents have been for a while. It's historically just been browsers pretending to be one another.

https://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

Servo is another wip web browser, managed by the Linux foundation's European branch. It's a little less far along but is making relatively quick progress now. Apparently discord already mostly works, with sending messages currently being a problem.

As a staunch Pale Moon user, Cloudflare is just being a bully and I circumvent their nonsense when I need to desperately use a particular site or just don't go to that site anymore if I can do without.

Another comment suggested that helped with LibreWolf, but that is a closer fork than Pale Moon, so not sure

You can go to https://hear-me.social and click on the register button. This puts up a Cloudflare managed challenge screen which endlessly loops when using Pale Moon. It would be interesting to see if Waterfox has the same issue.