Last year, Gab tried to set up a Mastadon instance. It was immediately blocked by just about every other instance in the Fediverse and by most Mastadon client app developers. It basically became a toxic cesspool/catchbasin that everyone avoids.
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At least it makes it easier to deal with from an internet security point of view, by putting all the rotten eggs in one basket.
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In my experience Hacker News swings pretty far right – check out any discussion of vaccinations or climate change.
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I’m glad they got chased out of Philly - out to Clark’s Sunmit, PA.
A town of 4-5,000 people.
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A hosting provider like that will lease rack space in one or more data centers, and those data centers are connected directly to a tier 2 or tier 1 ISP through a cable buried in the ground. I wouldn’t know the exact billing structure, but basically Epik will pay the data center for network access, and the data center will have an arrangement directly with AT&T, Level 3, Comcast, or whoever has the (near-)monopoly on physical cables in that area.
The data center might have, I dunno, a thousand tenants; they might be able to fire a tenant for nazism, but it’d be a big serious business decision for them.
The data center’s ISP (along with its handful of peers) could kick anyone they wanted off the internet, but that’s a box I don’t think anyone wants to open, even in cases like this.
The short version is that for a company that runs its own physical servers, in the US, the internet really is almost as censorship-resistant as the legends suggest. If you farm everything out to Amazon then it’s much less so, but it still only takes a little bit more effort to do it the old-fashioned way.
I don’t know if that was true at some point, but right now traceroute gab.com shows it to be proxied through Cloudflare.
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That was pretty informative.
Seems to me folks ought to be letting cloudflare know that they’re protecting Nazi websites. They might have a problem with it these days.
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Try a quick google on that; there’s substantial history that you should be aware of.
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