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Kiwifarms is probably done for. Null is unable to get legal representation because his lawyers dropped him after five years of business for "ties to russia" and his mailing address has been terminated for unspecified reasons. Tor is inaccessible because of DDOS attacks. The site has had a security breach and user data has possibly been leaked. This is probably the most complete deplatforming anyone who hasn't actually committed a crime yet has ever experienced.
I believe that KF has significant value in the culture war for the red team and it seems strange to me that not a single person with any financial power has stepped in to help. For most people, KF is seen as a evil nazi website and at best a shitty gossip forum, but it did contain a lot of useful information and opposition research on highly prominent people that will be memoryholed forever if the site goes down (Even internet archives are being purged). Keeping it alive on the clearnet would require a substantial investment, but it wouldn't be impossible to do.
Where is the red/grey team version of George Soros? Peter Thiel?
Are there any options for a completely legal (in the United States) site like KF to stay online? What will themotte do if they ever make an enemy that understands how easy it is to wipe them off the net?
Statements like this usually aren't true. I guess if you take 'deplatforming' to mean only this very specific context, but consider how 'freedom of speech' was a much less-held value anwyhere in something like the 18th or 19th centuries than it was either today or in the 20th, and consider the regular 'censorship' (and the sort of censorship might vary a lot) of newspapers back then, worse has likely happened. Josh could just be put in jail!
KF focuses on the most degenerate, spergy, and loud creatures on the internet, though. While what's wrong with kathryn gibes or chris-chan is related to what's wrong with 'the left' in some senses i guess, there's a lot of difference - and learning more about the bizzare and retarded exploits of the recurring characters is genuinely useful, by characterizing the ways human action can go wrong and can be surprising (which is arguably why it's funny), seeing 'crazy ugly trans person threatens suicide, posts newest medical mishap' doesn't do that much to characterize progressives or trans as a whole. So ... what does KF actually do for the red team, exactly? That people are willing to directly make fun of individual weak, stupid, degenerate people directly, and can see examples of others doing so, is valuable in a sense - but how does this translate directly to a 'red win', whether that means more R votes or neoreaction, and how is it different than past magazines or communities doing something similar (which did not translate to wins)?
Even in the 18th century, there was somewhere with people who held the freedom to speak among the most important values they could list.
Top of the list, in fact. Number one of 10.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_States
notably there are a lot of things much worse than what's happened to kiwifarms, which is my point
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For all the weird stuff that KF has done, what actually got them taken offline was posting true information about trans people.
KF did a lot besides that, but this is what I call "steelman Kiwi Farms." That is the site that deserves to exist but cannot.
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KF isn't so much Red as a holdout of the old, irreverent internet culture. While I don't actually LIKE KF, I was glad that things like it exist. I didn't hate Tumblr, I thought it was funny until I saw the same stuff in my Facebook feed from real people I knew in real life.
If we're going to talk about Red vs Blue, In a sense the entire Blue Checkmark Cancellation Machine is just KF, but distributed among a mob that gets to feel On The Right Side Of History, and that actually does make an effort to hurt people in real life.
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But then he would have committed a crime. That's my point. There's nothing in the US Law that says you can't use the internet to laugh at the things weird people do.
Well then we're working with an idiosyncratic definition of 'deplatforming', where if the emperor biden instated a 'conservative censorship committee', that'd be US law and therefore not deplatforming, and similar past instances where newspapers were shuttered for breaking contrived or broad laws also aren't deplatforming, which is the point
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