The public statement essentially says that "Alt-Tech" needs to create an alliance against censorship and intimidation, and for a good reason. KF is now essentially in an 8chan situation, but with a few differences.
The whole reason KF has had issues staying up when everyone else online has moved the fuck on is because of a certain ex-Google employee with a "consent accident" named Liz that everyone has nicknamed "dong gone", who now works at a tech startup. Said employee has been trying really hard to scrub his antics off the internet, including harassing KF with a @google.com email address on behalf of someone else, the "consent accident", and a HackerNews comment alleging he was close to open pedos.
In a way, it's very similar to 8chan and Fred's crusade to eradicate imageboards from the internet (complete with sanitizing aspects the past) but there's a few key differences; but the important one is Fred was ex-8chan and did it out of petty revenge (and cozying up with generic woke furries), Liz kept on poking the bear. Many of the same tactics are at play, from media hit pieces to harassing the right people.
Anyhow, anywhere KF goes Liz will harass the shit out of the people behind the site, from "girl talk" early in the morning to going after family members. When that fails, he'll use the Sleeping Giants/similar activist trick of making companies move hosts to pressure them into dropping KF.
So what Josh calls for is an alliance of Alt-Tech companies to find a datacenter that supports them and lets them host. Aside from the fact that this can very well be a single point of failure or asking to get hacked by some skid wanting to make a name for himself in the left (this is exactly why Epik was targeted and why some have said we shouldn't centralize on using only BuyVM), there's one other problem: KF literally doesn't have many allies.
When your site goes around pissing off everyone in groups on the internet that might give a shit about your issues or support you, they're not going to care. They're going to want your site to go down too and they won't care because they'll think you deserved it. A lot of the reasons why tech libertarians were willing to host fringe Neo Nazi websites back in the day is because they weren't personally going after them.
Which is the #1 takeaway from the KF thing. You want to have allies online, not enemies, and you want to be as drama free as possible. Drama is what hurt attempts at bunker imageboards (let alone the CP spam/fedposting that plagues some altboards), and it will hurt attempts at getting friends because they will remember what you did to them last year.
@PhenomX6
>Drama is what hurt attempts at bunker imageboards (let alone the CP spam/fedposting that plagues some altboards), and it will hurt attempts at getting friends because they will remember what you did to them last year.
In the case of the 8/v/ alts, most just wanted an excuse to get away from Mark. Others were sick of GamerGate threads taking up most of the activity.
Others are literally dead unfortunately and many of the people are now on the fedi I'm sure.
@PhenomX6 Mark ran vch which was on the webring. He only intended to run it until 8kun was ready. Once he shutdown vch, most people went to julay. Eventually Mark had enough of the 8kun rebranding and new policies, wrote an open letter to Jim and Ron, and later got fired. He and Acid launched 8chan.moe which is the closest thing to the original 8chan. 8chan.moe is still pretty active, at least the /v/ board is. All the popular boards on 8chan have (semi)-active alts on either 8moe or any of the webring boards.
Yeah a lot of former 8chan users are on the Fedi now, from what I can tell. Either that or they went to niche forums like RPGCodex. I most of them would rather be on 8chan though, especially with all the nonstop pepe, wojack, and gigachad posts on here. Instances like Poast seem to align more with 4chan than 8chan in terms of culture.
@PhenomX6 Also, Mark's moderation on vch was the absolute worst. He was using an outdated version of vichan (the only PHP imageboard software that supported the webring), and his lack of technical knowledge only contributed to it. If you got banned, all the posts under your IP were deleted, and knowing him some of the bans were of stupid reasons (he actually banned people for necrobumping). He also told people to "tone down the Nazi posting" because he thought that his bunker would also be targeted after what happened to 8chan and the then-recent mass shooting where he was mentioned in the manifesto.
Some anons got so pissed at him that they bot-spammed threads insulting him in retaliation (which was easier since it was running on outdated software). Mark's solution was to put the site behind Cloudflare which broke federation with the webring.
People also didn't like how Mark was quick to jump onto 8kun as soon as it was ready. At that point, most anons agreed that they were better off with the webring which was decentralized as opposed to keeping all their eggs in one basket. Most people moved to Julay, but Julay users were sick of nonstop GamerGate and idpol discussions. They actually wanted to talk about good games and not about how trannies are ruining the industry 24/7.
Eventually, Julay went to shit because the owner regretted adding too many boards which he felt hurt the decentralization of the webring, so he killed a bunch of boards and moved them to different servers, with /v/ and /cow/ being the only major boards still on there. The owner of Julay was working on a project known as Final Solution which was supposed to be the Fediverse of imageboards, but that never materialized.
Most of the smaller boards on the ring had trouble because the owners were inexperienced with servers and hosting. Most of them went to 8chan.moe after it launched, and the userbases have been split ever since.
At least 8moe/v/ seems to actually be gaining users (presumably users who are rediscovering it). Only problem with it is that it's behind Cloudflare and Mark disabled Tor posting on /v/ (the only way to post without CF) because he was fed up with Luciano and niggerpill shitting up threads. (Though this is only a problem if Cloudflare bothers you)
They're not wrong tbh, especially not with how 8chan proved eggs in a basket is a bad idea (or Reddit with censorship).
@PhenomX6 Yeah looking back on it, 8chan being the Reddit of imageboards was a terrible idea. Just look at how Reddit killed forums.
Even before 8chan, you could find a lot of niche imageboards and textboards outside of 4chan. There was one for TF2 fans, Shrek fans, MLP fans, furries, drug-addicts, even one for train enthusiasts. Imageboards shouldn't be that difficult to host. Vichan is written in PHP so it should be possible to run on a shared host. The only issue you have to deal with is moderation.
The webring should've been the future of imageboards, but the user split, technical illiteracy, the fact that the imageboard software that supports the webring lacks certain features that 8chan had like certain markup options, drama between sites, and people wanting to go back to 8kun hoping it would be like 8chan mostly killed it. You even had sort of an equivalent to the fediblock culture you see on here where some site owners would blacklist other boards on their webrings for retarded reasons.
The webring is still around and some boards are still (semi)-active, but most of the active boards are on either zzzchan or anon.cafe, with Sportschan and AlogsSpace for sports and lolcow discussions respectively.
