There are secondary / tertiary methods of contact. People have accounts on other platforms like Twitter, Matrix, Telegram, Discord, Mastodon, Reddit, etc. There are other watering holes people can regain contact. The community would be utterly fractured, but such was the case when Reddit dropped the hammer on us. I think our past experience served well. Establish a life raft. Gather the troops. Plot a course forward.
That said, we were relatively lucky last time. The regime of censorship has sharpened significantly in the past four years since then. If the US government were to lean on Hexbear's ISP (or domain registrar), a life raft on a service like Discord would fold like a house of cards (not to mention being 100% wiretapped). We would need more robust options. There is the Matrix server, but it is tied up with the same infrastructure. The people who use it have accounts distributed among various Matrix servers though.
The fracturing of the community is what I worry about most. Sites and software and services come and go. All that matters is that the community can find each other again quickly.
There are secondary / tertiary methods of contact. People have accounts on other platforms like Twitter, Matrix, Telegram, Discord, Mastodon, Reddit, etc. There are other watering holes people can regain contact. The community would be utterly fractured, but such was the case when Reddit dropped the hammer on us. I think our past experience served well. Establish a life raft. Gather the troops. Plot a course forward.
That said, we were relatively lucky last time. The regime of censorship has sharpened significantly in the past four years since then. If the US government were to lean on Hexbear's ISP (or domain registrar), a life raft on a service like Discord would fold like a house of cards (not to mention being 100% wiretapped). We would need more robust options. There is the Matrix server, but it is tied up with the same infrastructure. The people who use it have accounts distributed among various Matrix servers though.
The fracturing of the community is what I worry about most. Sites and software and services come and go. All that matters is that the community can find each other again quickly.