This is the story of Gab’s most difficult and most controversial decision to date. On September 1st I opened my email to see a note from the compliance department of our domain registrar, AsianRegistry.com. Instantly I knew something was up. They asked that we update our contact information on the gab.ai domain within one week or it “may result in the suspension of the domain.” To be fair: the address was outdated. The last time we tried to update it on the AsianRegistry website it failed. We promptly provided the requested information and updated to our new address.
A few days later we heard back, only this time it was from AsianRegistry’s legal team. They noted that they had received a “formal complaint” about content posted on Gab. They cited the individual link in question and told us that we had 48 hours to remove “any images that are in violation of their policies.” We then proceeded to read their guidelines to determine what violation could have occurred with the post they cited. We have followed up with their legal team to get some clarity and specifics about which clause was violated. The only thing that stuck out to us was the following vague and ambiguous clause:
Instra Corporation prohibits unlawful use of a registered domain name or product/service we supply, in a manner that is harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, or hateful against another party. This includes, but is not limited to, hate speech, discrimination or harassment on the basis of gender, religion, sexuality or race. Instra Corporation reserves the right to suspend or delete any product or service that, after reasonable investigation, is deemed to be in breach of this clause. You’ll also note in their guidelines that they “typically give 15 days,” in our case we were given 48 hours to act.
Instra generally provides registrants with 15 days notice of a pending domain action due to a violation of our Terms of Service in order to provide them with the opportunity to remedy the alleged violation. If the registrant is not in violation of our Terms of Service at the end of the 15 day notice period, we may cancel any pending action and consider the matter resolved. This notice period may change depending on the circumstances. Upon looking at their guidelines, we reviewed the post in question to determine if it had broken our own Community Guidelines. Our guidelines are very clear about properly tagging content that is Not Safe For Work.
We believe the post in question was indeed obscene. It should have been marked #NSFW and it was not, therefore it is in violation of our Community Guidelines. This is not the first time we have enforced our guidelines. Gab has banned users for spamming, making death threats to the President, posting revenge porn, and doxing among others. We’ve been transparent and incredibly fair about this on many occasions. We believe this effort was coordinated and planned. We knew this day would come and now we have entered a crossroads with a very binary decision: remove one post or lose our domain and thus the entire website.
Our choice was very clear to me. The post needs to come down. If it does not, we lose our domain. To my knowledge there are no pro-free speech domain registrars and that is a massive problem. Our only other option now would be to play a cat and mouse game by transferring our domain to another registrar. Others who have attempted to play this game have failed and even had their domain seized completely from under them. We will not play these games. We have little choice, for now.
The free and open internet as we know it is under attack. It is centralized and controlled by no more than a handful of companies who provide these services: - Hosting - DDoS protection - Payment Processing - Domain Registrars - Mobile device hardware and software distribution
Without any of these things an individual website can not possibly compete and operate at scale. If left unchecked, these centralized platforms will continue their dominance and control the means of all information, personal data, and communication on the internet. It’s not too late to save the free and open internet. Decentralized platforms built on the blockchain (including Gab in the near future) will inevitably give the power and control to The People and make the internet censorship-proof. Gab wants to lead the creation of the next level of the internet. If Web 2.0 was about centralized, social, and mobile networks: Web 3.0 will be a decentralized, blockchain-based, radically transparent, people-powered internet infrastructure.
We are actively looking for a new registrar. This post will hopefully inspire other teams to start building or attract talented engineers to Gab who want to help us protect the free and open web. Until then, we will continue to build and fight for the freedoms we cherish.
TL;DR: "Centralized social media platform vulnerable to problems related to centralization."
Gab.ai, like all Twitter wannabes, was doomed from the moment it began. Either it was going to fade into obscurity due to dwindling userbase, or it was going to become successful and attract the attention of the powers-that-be who'd then use all the dirty tricks they could to stomp it out (like banning the mobile app from walled-garden app stores, or cutting them off from ad networks, or these sorts of DNS shenanigans, or outright buying out the owners.) Centralization is a path to censorship.
Decentralize, folks. GNU Social is a mature, stable alternative. Drop Gab.ai and move to a platform that's uncensorable.
Matthew Wood
Truly disgusting. The gloves are beginning to come off and now if any is the time to begin preparing for leaving normienet behind.
Luke Long
k.
Michael Clark
There's no way they can run a site like that on .ai. When will people learn that alt TLDs are not just vanity.
GNU Social isn't an uncensorable platform. If a GNU Social instance is hosted on the clearnet, it's subject to the same threat that gab.ai faced from its registrar.
It's uncensorable in the sense that a single person or organization cannot stop a user from using Social to post.
Admin gets their fees fees hurt and goes on a ban rampage? Admin sells out to some tech company? Site just vanishes? Just switch to another Social instance, or start one's own. Problem solved.
Good luck moving to another Gab.ai instance.
Bentley Butler
It will be once it's ported to gnunet.
This
Isaac Cooper
It was GNU Social's own page. Thanks for the link, seems confusing.
Ok, but I'm not really in the mood to read a howto just to twatter.
Look, I'm not shitting on GNU social, I'm sure it's just fine. But it's time some non-autists to start looking into these problems now.
Zachary Phillips
That's a meaningless definition of "uncensorable." It renders GNU Social no different than a web server hosting a comment you've made on your own domain. Which is essentially what GNU Social is, if nobody will federate with your instance for fear of having their own domain pulled.
There is a software solution to content censorship, but it's called Freenet, not GNU Social.
Since it hasn't been, that's pretty fucking meaningless, isn't it?
Grayson Russell
The torrent sites massive shut-down comes from this too This is the now UN-ICANN, who have no responsibility to Free Speech, pressuring Registrars to terminate sites This was thought since the beginning by the disgusting Leftists of the Obama admin
Oliver Evans
How many times do we have to say it? #NOAIRFORBIGOTS You will be deplatformed. You will be threatened. You will be silenced. You will conform.
There's no moral justification to allow bigots to spread hate speech on the internet. Privacy is a vague concept in general and as it's being deconstructed, we'll likely see the abolition of it. There's nothing wrong with this as alienation can only occur in private.
Since I heard people talking about GNUsocial, I figured I should post and list some good, Holla Forums friendly instances. These are instances explicitly run by anons, or friendly to community anyways.
gs.smuglo.li - run by Holla Forums /a/'s Board Owner, allows loliposting and just about all forms of speech; anime oriented
sealion.club - formed by a Gamergater and libertarian but somewhat abandoned; allows free speech, kinda Holla Forums kinda Holla Forums
unsafe.space - run by a Holla Forums regular, allows and encourages free speech, geared largely towards Holla Forums and Holla Forums
Zachary Mitchell
Is it only domain names that are subject to being denied here? If that's the case you could scan every ipv4/6 address for web servers, grep the meta tags, and build a search engine based on that. I could be wrong, but I think they're denying and threatening anyone that would give these people valid world access address to host a server on.
Jeremiah Turner
I don't understand how gnusocial works. If I go on any of those instances do I get to read shit from all of them? Or are they isolated instances?
Brody Wood
You get to read the posts from all the instances yours knows exists, so in short, mostly everything.
Some instances don't play nicely though and block other instances whole sale. A lot of Mastodon instances do this, but that's because they were never good-faith participants in the oStatus federation.
But yeah, you'll be able to read everything that exists on the free parts of the network.
Justin Rogers
gs. smuglo.li/ and unsafe. space/ is literally owned by the not secret agency. Literally a fucking botnet. The other two look ok though.
Jordan Lee
Nice try on that FUD there, but you'll have to give your shill game a bit more effort. Both are run completely compliant with the AGPL.
Josiah Brooks
Can I use my user interchangeably on different instances?
Jordan Perez
Nice gets, but no, some people have alternative accounts though to get different perspectives on the federation.
It would probably be irresponsible and insecure to let login information federate, even encrypted.
Adam Allen
So how does 8ch retain it's domain name?
Nathan Hernandez
>what is markmonitor/unsafe. space/ >what is the Yomura Corporation/NASA/gs. smuglo.li/ Gas yourself for bringing (((them))) here.
I don't know, you tell me. The burden of proof is on you, you've presented this notion that both of these sites are government projects.
Ryan Green
What is the appeal of twitter and twitter-clones? I've never got it.
Jacob Wright
I'd like to know this too. Looked at it briefly many years ago and thought it looked stupid and cumbersome. But people get addicted to that shit like it's crack. Anyone here who can explain why?
Oliver Nelson
Markmonitor is literally the owner of (((amazon))) and github. Let that sink in.
I have no direct proof on Yomura though. Only indirect but unless you want to get into things like the moon landings being faked. Or that most companies of its nature are shells for kikes. Then I will just sound crazy.
Isaac Allen
Well, explain the connections then. That places like nasa and github are intel operations aren't really shocking news around here.
Logan Hughes
My reasoning goe, if the moonlandngs are faked then NASA is a huge money laundering scheme for kike with the occasional sattlite launch. But if that is true then companies creating (((space furniture and insulation))) are also money laundering schemes since no human has actually been or survived space. This all hinges on it being impossible to survive the conditions that are space and the faking of the landings. Ive seen a few other shell companies claiming to be injection molding creators for burgerland too. Usually in the (((EU))) though. So I assumed it was just kikery and ignored it till now.
Ryder Carter
You can look at Twitter in at least two ways: 1. A super newsfeed where you get breaking news before it's published anywhere else. To do this, follow your favorite journalists and news sites. 2. A huge, worldwide chatroom with everyone ignored by default. To do this, find and follow people with common interests, and start commenting on their posts. If they like your comments, they sometimes follow you back.
Social media is basically an electronic Skinner box. You post some witty bons mots or some humblebrag, then refresh refresh refresh refresh--ah, someone liked my tweet!!!--refresh refresh refresh--someone responded! And so forth.
It's also appealing to women and numales (together they are the vast majority of frequent twitter users) because they're always engaging in social climbing. Stacy knows her friends aren't actually interested that she tries a new latte at the expensive coffee joint. And the coffee itself is beside the point. The reason she posts a picture of it to twitter is to provoke envy. "Hey, bitches! I just took a picture of my $10 coffee with my $1000 iPhone 7."
Wyatt Peterson
Except Markmonitor doesn't own unsafe.space and Yomura doesn't own gs.smuglo.li ; how did you reach the conclusion they're related?
Joseph White
Those two websites aren't related to eachother moron. It is like comparing cianiggers to not secret agents. One is a incompetent, kiked, power hungry moron. The other is just a power hungry kiked technocrat. Both are kiked though so it matters not.
Sebastian Wood
Neither site is a company and the point remains that you've presented no evidence of suspicious activity from the administration of either community.
Basically you're full of shit and paranoid delusions.
Grayson Watson
Why do you waste your time arguing with the paranoid autistic?
Elijah Sullivan
...
Brayden Davis
Nah, you're complicating it too much. The moon landings are probably fake, but the industry around it is real enough. Why shouldn't it be, it's the easiest way of going about it and not where most of the dough goes anyways. And even so, the space program isn't fake even if the moon landings are. The sky have been filled with spy satellites and they got up there somehow.
But that wasn't really what I was asking. I was wondering about your way of connecting those gnu social thingies to nasa and shit.
Nathan Bennett
Public service? Reality checks are good for people, especially the delusional ones.
Ryder Rogers
I don't disagree, but all the stuff you're saying there is pretty much covered already with faceberg. There must be something particular twatter brings to the table? I guess it's something like but that too feels like it doesn't explain it fully.
Perhaps it's the celebrity angle? It gets the women and numales you're talking about feel like they're in some way socializing with celebrities? I don't know. I know it's cancer though. Which leads to the eternal question: should we save the internet for normalfags or just exodus ourselves and try to ride the tiger on our own?
Joseph Thompson
...
Brayden Harris
You broke the guy. Now he's only posting pictures.
Isaiah Roberts
They failed by not requesting to see the complaint to verify that it was genuine
Angel Richardson
You're that Libertarian retard, right? Please, get a grip and look at the situation. You'll die with them censoring you and you saying that there's no proof that they're doing it.
Carson Perez
What was the post though?
Daniel Wilson
...
Charles Garcia
Whoops, pic related instead.
Jack Watson
This image, with "INTERNET FATTIES: LEARN THE TRUTH"
it's still up for me anyway
Luis Reed
I got confused because I thought OP implied it was some obscene/NSFW post.
Be careful what you wish for----you might actually get it.
Eli Ward
...
Joseph Morris
So it's an anime community where nobody knows anything about anime, nobody watches anime, and nobody likes anime. Kind of like /a/.
The last three also sound exactly the same as 4chan and Holla Forums. Redundant.
Levi Butler
there are censor-free domain registrars examples:
zensurfrei - designed SPECIFICALLY for registering and hosting 'hate speech REEEE" tucows (Holla Forums's registrar)
The medium post on this betrays the complete lack of due diligience by Torba into terms of service.
What moron would register a free speech social network on a domain with an SJW clause in its terms of service.
Elijah Carter
That sounds like a Jewish trap, user. ICANN recognizes the owner of the domain as who's on the whois data. They'd legally own your domain and could steal it from you.
Ethan Gutierrez
twitter is _the_ battlefield in practice you get to interact with "everyone" (everyone you like), both particular private people and celebrities now twatter censors and shadowbans a lot, curbing a lot of its platform's power, but that power is unique by the very way it is designed
Zensurfrei is quite nice, why isn't it mentioned more often?
Jackson Gray
I'm just waiting for IPFS(-js) to finally reach the milestones where it becomes practical, then we can say goodbye to these shitty problems.
Juan Jones
Maybe they thought it was a dead body over the car? Not that it justifies anything obviously but that could be considered NSFW if users are required to tag posts as such
Jordan Brooks
IT'S JUST A TLD user. NOTHING BAD WILL HAPPEN user
Ayden Bennett
Stop typing everything in redtext Also gb2/pol/
Jordan Martin
/a/ Mods & BO edit and delete posts that hurt their feefees. They're Woke-level trash.
Carter Lopez
Run a server. Domain Register goes Mao on you. "Hey fags, just use the IP." 15 year-old Holla Forumstards: REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE "###.###.###.###/ still works, fuckwit." 15 year-old Holla Forumstards: IZ NO ON DA INTERNET ANYMORE!!!!!!!
Hunter Phillips
...
Leo Richardson
That's the plan. Setting up some Tier 2 servers that will be up in a few days. Maybe a Tier 1 and new TLD sometime later this year. Also writing some imageboard software for a new .chan. For those wondering, OpenNIC now mirrors the primary DNS root run by ICANN. If you set your DNS resolver to one of the OpenNIC servers, you can access all their TLDs as well as everything that's recognized by ICANN. Make sure to pick one that has a no logging policy.
Evan Davis
Nice
Jayden Reed
ans use dnscrypt
Nolan Walker
from one retard to another tell me, How will IPFS fix the IANA problem?
