So KF/Josh released a statement (the attachment) after their latest outage and it's very telling and I'll go into why.

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.

I never paid too much attention to the /v/ alts but I heard from a friend part of what happened, namely the split over loli posting, Mark, and how Mark flip flopped between bunkers, 8kun, then his own board again.

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.