Farside redirecting gateway shuts down: 'project is no longer practical to operate and maintain'

Farside¹ - the redirecting service for various FOSS alternative frontends - was just shut down² by its maintainer (Ben Busby³) and the project’s source code has been archived on GitHub/Sourcehut⁴:

Farside was created before the explosion of AI-driven scraping and bot traffic. As a result, querying instance status is no longer reliable due to bot-detection and challenge systems (which I understand and am in favor of, btw). Since the project is no longer practical to operate and maintain, it is being archived. Thank you to everyone who supported the project over the years!

Note that a vast amount of Monero Observer reports contain active links to various Farside frontends, which have obviously stopped working. Please do not message me to report this issue.

This is an ongoing story and the report will be updated when new information is available.