Red Rozenglass on Nostr: I think it's probably a good thing that big sites like Facebook or Twitter or such ...

I think it's probably a good thing that big sites like Facebook or Twitter or such refuse plain text, because if they didn't, "oppressors" may force their populace to only use plain text browsers so they can spy on them, and the oppressed won't do much about it because they don't understand the implications. While the current status-quo makes forcing the use of plain text clients equivalent to blocking all major internet services, which would be more revolting to the populace. Big corpos probably know that, and force TLS as an intentional measure against allowing "enemies" to spy on users, and leave the control in big corpo's hands to give the spying data only to "friends". The use of Cloudflare by half the internet perhaps demonstrates that it is not about privacy, as much as "we only allow the eyes we want to allow".

As for smaller internet sites, personal sites, blogs, or archives of scientific knowledge and such, I'm very much in favor of them accepting plain text connections if the user requested explicitly. Perhaps, a middle ground, to work around the stupid behavior of modern web clients, would be to force TLS on the main site, but then have a mirror of the entire site on a subdomain (notls.mysite.org) that does not force TLS connections. This can even go for big corpo silos, if they wanted, e.g. notls.facebook.com, but then again they probably won't do that, because they would risk losing the monopoly power they hold over that information.