Cloudflare has dropped 8chan...

Network provider Cloudflare to drop 8chan after El Paso shooting By Tim Stelloh and Brandy Zadrozny Aug. 4, 2019, 11:52 PM EDT nbcnews.com

I can't possibly explain how huge of a deal this is.

Cloudflare is a provider of a caching service for a huge portion of the internet. They do far more than that though. They ensure that thousands of websites can withstand DDoS attacks.

They are such a massive deal that when they went down not that long ago, it was like the entire internet went down. My TV box barely worked, because so many of the services that it used were on the web, and used Cloudflare. My internet kind of worked, but tons of websites would not load. I thought that a major trunk of the internet must have gone down. But no, it was Cloudflare.

So, when Cloudflare decides that they're going to not work with a certain company, it's a pretty big deal.

Though perhaps more people should actually move to other providers, as the recent outage suggested. The problem is that Cloudflare is really the leader. There are some other providers, but they don't really have the same level of service, and in some cases may be more expensive.

It's not like Cloudflare is picky with who uses them either. Porn sites use them. Hackers use them. Pirates use them. Republicans use them. The only case that they have previously denied a site their services was the Daily Stormer, which is named after a historic Nazi paper if I'm remembering correctly. I dunno, there's this long ass explanation of their name that's too complicated to remember.

8chan isn't a Neo-Nazi site though. It's just a site where they have decided to not moderate it at all. Sure, there's a fuckton of nasty crap there, but that's humanity for you. Humans are vile and disgusting by our own standards.

This is a huge deal that I'm not sure anyone will even understand how huge of a deal it is.

Cloudflare, a company that's almost necessary for a modern website to use, has decided that a site is not allowed to use it's services, because it has chosen to not moderate and censor it's public forums.

8chan is not breaking any laws. They are not intentionally making a site for Neo-Nazis or White Supremacists or Bronys. They are just saying that they are going to run a site where people don't have to worry about being censored or banned, and they aren't going to hire people to go through all the posts and censor and ban people. That's it.

It's the bare basic forum version of Steem kinda. Except we have a bit more censorship, because we have flags.

This is a massive huge astronomical deal for the internet.

In a time where it seems like we're inching closer and closer towards a dystopian future where we're all under massive surveillance and every call we make and purchase we do is being tracked, one single provider that is instrumental to the modern internet just said that if you don't censor your website, we aren't going to provide service for you.

And we're fucking arguing against socialized healthcare? Fuck you! We just moved a bit closer toward a corporate Stalin-esk empire.

It is not the job of some random website to police people's speech. In fact, people should be able to generally say what they want. They will whether you want them to or not. It's just a matter of how you and the world reacts to it.

These people putting their hate filled words into the public is a good thing in one aspect, because then, when it is worrisome, you can have someone look into it and determine if you really should be worried.

In a non-dystopian future, I would imagine that when they posted troubling things, maybe someone would send them someone to talk to to make sure they're alright and help them to put their anger over whatever is causing that hatred of difference towards something constructive.

In current society, they'll possibly end up on some watch list, and arrested when they do something illegal, if they have enough info on it.

But when we push them down into encrypted chats with groups of them...we just created a terrorist cell.

_{Image by Bill Kerr July 28, 2006 (source)
Used under the CC BY-SA 2.0 License}