I did have something similar, but in my case it was an involuntary favor from Meta, as they presented a blocking screen asking whether I agree to use my personal information for targeted ads. The options were I agree or I pay. So I just wouldn't click either and hence I just couldn't access their sites anymore lol. (yeah well, I didn't give up that easily originally, as funnily enough you could find methods to bypass the screens and the APIs in apps would still fully work and let you use it, but it was more trouble than worth it eventually)

There was also Twitter, which had also solved the problem by itself. After the take-over, the quality of content rapidly plummeted so hard, at certain point I just didn't feel like ever visiting the site again.

So I'm almost thankful to these companies for actively pushing people out like that, y'know? I'm just sorry for people still stuck in there, it must be even more miserable presently...

For those who don't use it already, the following is a great compilation of curated block lists you can put into your etc/hosts file to block traffic :)

https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

Doesn’t work for Safari on macOS, as it does not respect /etc/hosts nor your DNS settings, it uses its own.

Ha, I did the same about 15 years ago. Nowadays don’t need the file anymore but it was a good way to get rid of that initial automated behaviour.