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Update on Kiwi Farms:
It's not looking good. DDoS-Guard dropped them without warning.
There has been no communication from them to anyone explaining their decision.(EDIT: See below.) Some speculate it was because of yet another false flag fedposter who lurked for 3 years before posting a blatant bomb threat that was promptly deleted by moderators in less than 20 minutes, but not before being screenshotted and posted to Keffals's Twitter.Regardless, the site is off the clearnet and is now only accessible through Tor. Site owner Null has released a statement that says, among other things, the current host will likely give up too, along with the other two potential hosts he's looking at towards for moving.
EDIT: DDoS-Guard have released a statement. They were getting tons of complaints from users that it violated their acceptable use policy and thus found it fit to take matters into their own hands instead of waiting for law enforcement to tell them. Not surprising, tbh.
see, the free market means companies cannot collude /sarcasm
same pattern we have seen in the past . one censors and the rest follow. alex jones another example
I think this is why it's so important to not get banned even if it means temporarily compromising. I posted yesterday that kiwi should have gone into hibernation mode while migrating instead of keeping the site up. This way they would have not been officially banned by Cloudflare. Being banned is the scarlet letter that makes it impossible to find alternatives. It was smart of TheMotte to begin migration b4 Reddit admins came down.
Moon himself addresses this in his update:
Emphasis mine. There is no acceptable compromise in the minds of the attackers, they love the boot and they just want to keep stomping.
This is an excellent quote thanks for sharing. I have been anti-censorship for most of my life but recently have fallen off in emphasizing its importance. This quote convinced me to be more vigilant in the future.
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They haven't even stopped attacking Cloudflare, because Prince took too long to block the site, and they are demanding he resign. Simultaneously, they've taken attention off of the site to now focus on their own - Liz-Fong Jones is accusing Keffals of facilitating "microaggressions" with her chat either willingly or unwillingly (but that's the definition of "microaggression" in the first place).
I think we've repeatedly seen this sort of thing play out, though perhaps not in such a blatant fashion. There are two options when the mob comes for you, immediate and unquestioning obedience to their demands (no guarantee of safety) or total repudiation. That's it. Any attempt at walking a middle path, any wavering in your chosen stance, is the twitter equivalent of going swimming off Playa del Carmem at twilight with bloody steaks taped to yourself. Had Cloudflare stuck to their guns, stayed the course, and other idioms that mean the same thing, the entire keffles/kiwifarms kerfuffle would have blown over in maybe a week at most. By caving to the mob after taking an initial stance against them, they have signaled weakness and will be set upon without mercy.
This reminds me of an old story about an indie game on Steam, it's called Heartbeat. The lead developer is a lesbian, and her girlfriend had very public negative opinions about transwomen on twitter. As expected, a cancel mob ensued to go after the developer because of what her girlfriend had been saying on twitter, but her response to the cancel mob turned out to be a middle finger so huge and outrageous nobody expected it. Instead of saying anything, she put the game on sale at a 41% discount in an apparent reference to trans suicide rates. The review bombing attempts were quickly countered and the developer pretty much got off without any major consequences, all that happened was that her girlfriend privated her twitter for some time.
A thing of note in this case is that Steam never removed the game and they didn't even acknowledge the controversy, even the response from the developer herself, despite being so hostile, was also subtle enough so that it would fly over the head of any casual observer.
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