Good question. I can't speak on marketing, strategy etc but from an editorial perspective, an email address is the smallest thing we can ask for to justify keeping the site free.
The Long Room was difficult for other reasons. Everything there was on FT webspace and was built by FT people, but with strictly limited access, so the compliance folks were comfortable. Moderation was light but within our control. Risks were known, therefore manageable. The eventual decision to kill LR was taken largely in the hope that we could replace it with something better. That's a work in progress.
Hello! Author of the story here. Happy to answer any questions.
Though we all love archive.ph, FT Alphaville isn't behind a paywall. Email registration -- on the far right of the barrier page -- gives unlimited access.
I set up the server during the peak exodus from Twitter. We use Twitter a lot, both to get stories out and to listen to readers, so the risk of it dying was very real. We made the decision to get a minimal-viable-product up asap, to give our Twitter refugee readers somewhere to go.
Urgency to act meant avoiding committees and working the difficult stuff out later. But Twitter survived, 'Don user engagement was meh, and the difficult stuff became not worth it.
The 160gb thing isn't just a Johnny Mnemonic reference. I'm a lazy coder who relies on cludges, so my 'Don deployment was a mess of duplication and surplus. About three weeks after launch the server hit 100% storage and crashed. I had the option of fixing the code or buying more space. Because I'm lazy I took the second option. A week later it hit 100% and crashed again.
Though it was obvious the setup was broken, the long-term strategy of repair always lost out to the short-term fix of buying more space.
We talked about keeping the server going but restricting it to staff only. Ultimately though, it still involved jumping through many hoops to make everything compliant, and while we all like the Fediverse to varying degrees it hasn't yet become essential to our work. We just couldn't justify the time required.
Maybe the FT can be convinced into doing something official eventually. I'm certainly not against it, so long as I'm not involved in the IT or legal side.