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.
Acid Man allowed /hebe/, the rest of the webring cut them off, and they got booted from 90% of the webring. I know smugloli's problem is a tranny acting as a one-wound APT of sorts, devoting months of time to screwing with an alt site that just hosts anime discussion.
Honestly, it's easy to see 4chan's decaying hard, too. I think imageboards are on the way out.
4chan is dying for several reasons, the #1 reason being the jannies who never do their job and use it to power trip (and are probably trannies too judging by what finally got /qa/ locked). I've heard a theory that soyjak posting is a response to the janny behavior. The other reasons 4chan is dying of course being that discussion quality has dropped, there's theories that AI and shills and feds flood the site (the latter was confirmed with the infamous 8chan subponea featuring (you) in posts and a TORtanic shill admitted to it as well), and every board is flooded with sliding posts.
To add to that, there's a culture gap. Just like how IRC died off when the boomers died off and the zoomers refused to use it (along with Discord), imageboard culture is seen as oof yikes problematic even if 4chan these days is sterilized as hell (or the person complaining spent $10 to post on a forum). Others see imageboard hosting as inviting CP and spam, having to deal with the FBI, and of course there's the decay of 4chan (while altboards are slow). The younger generation would rather post on sites like TikTok and Reddit.
@PhenomX6 @mrsaturday
>I've heard a theory that soyjak posting is a response to the janny behavior.
There was some 8chan post screencap (which I don't have) from someone claiming to have created most (if not all) of the wojack variants. Apparently, he was a furry artist and someone with enough money and autism commissioned all those wojak variants.
>Just like how IRC died off when the boomers died off and the zoomers refused to use it
IRC was actually making a small comeback back in the early 2010s thanks to the rise of livestreaming (some of their chats were IRC), FOSS becoming somewhat more popular, and web developers realizing that it is easier just to host an IRC channel and embed it with a web client than it is to use some proprietary Flash, Java, or AJAX solution for a webchat/shoutbox. From what I've heard, Discord only got popular because Skype was down for awhile. People suggested Discord as a temporary alternative. It turned out to be better and the rest is history.
>Others see imageboard hosting as inviting CP and spam, having to deal with the FBI
Last time, I checked, Epik doesn't allow imageboards anymore because of the multiple shootings linked to 8chan and because someone tried to report one bunker for CP, when in reality it was just loli.
Not to mention that owners of controversial communities feel the need to use DDoS protection these days and aren't aware that there are local solutions for those, so they end up using Cloudflare or any alternative. If things get any worse, we might see imageboards becoming a thing that you only see on the darkweb.
I'm actually concerned that something similar could happen to the fedi where a Christchurch situation happens and people become too afraid to host instances anymore while others start becoming more strict on blocking. I have a feeling that they are going to keep pushing these glowie-ops until we are all forced into walled-gardens.
@mint @PhenomX6 @mrsaturday I never said it was true.
https://soyjak.wiki/Furry_artist_conspiracy_theory