That was it, yeah. Thank you.
open_door
Oh my god, I totally thought 12ft.io was just for academic papers and journals. I tried it on The Atlantic (one of the worst in my experience) and it worked like a charm.
It has indeed been removed from Firefox's add-on store. I'll look at the alternatives you gave, thank you. :)
I've never used Usenet... I'm really not familiar with it, tbh. I just DDL or stream everything lol.
Ah, thank you! That makes a lot of sense. I'm broadly familiar with CDNs, so I figured they must all be using the same database, but I never made the step from that to "the sites themselves might have the same owners".
Ah, and now I see where the miscommunication came from. I got all these sites from the r/Piracy megathread (which, I understand, is curated for safety and quality) and I browse with an antivirus and adblocker anyway. Sketchiness is not my primary concern, though I appreciate the recommendations. I'm just curious if anyone knows why they all look the same.
I'll keep that in mind, but it is not an answer to either of my questions.
Responding very late to say it's called MonsterQuest - sorry, I thought giving the name would violate the rules of this lemmy instance. (is that the right terminology?)