Antipodean fruit growers 3 - Is the Kiwi a Dodo or a Phoenix?

[Bosky]

Continuation thread from Antipodean fruit growers 2 - Canary in the internet coal mine
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4632616-antipodean-fruit-growers-2-canary-in-the-internet-coal-mine

Front row seat on the seemingly eternal battle between Jersh (aka Suzi Quatro's Fat Nan) and his Merry Band of Farmers against the Transpowered Forces of Internet Censorship.

1st Thread - Antipodean fruit grower statement
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4620584-antipodean-fruit-grower-statement

No mention of Alejandra Caraballo (who's back on Twitter) can pass without a link to one of the best gotchas of recent times:

The first 2 minutes leads to the "ohhh!" moment.

That was beautiful. Thanks for the reminder.

What an absolute twat. 'My words were taken out of context in that you've actually listened to them and pointed out where they might have actual real life consequences and that's not fair because reasons'.

I logged in to see if this had been posted. A false and deliberate accusation of child sexual abuse material is an absolutely reprehensible tactic and I'm very glad Epik hurriedly backtracked on it. What's not covered just in that tweet is two specific consequences that follow from it. Firstly that they have been forced toissue Null with a certified retraction of their accusation and anybody who used their accusation as a basis in their own statements or coverage must now issue their own retractions on being referred to this and failure to retract will now be evidence of "Malice". Big deal legally, apparently. Secondly, Epik must now assist Null in gaining back one of the domains from an intermediary registrar that they were involved in Null losing.

@Ereshkigalangcleg
> "The TRAs are hopping mad, but when aren't they."

On dilation Tuesday. Hopping too painful.

@NicCageisnotNickCave
> "Same! Although tbf to Gen Z, YouTubers are as famous as actual celebs were in previous generations."

I watched a video from the How Money Works channel on YouTube that went into details of how Influencers are now more valuable to advertisers through sponsorships than any other form of advertising. Was quite a detailed video but the tl;dr: is that YouTube celebs are the hottest thing in advertising. So it's a pretty big deal.

Also, a little late and maybe seen elsewhere, but this was the video that Null posted for International Women's Day the other week. I understood maybe a third of it but it made me laugh. Spotted the picture of Null on Keffel's dartboard in the background.

I recognise more from that video that I would have expected 😵

TOTAL WOMAN VICTORY

awww wouldn’t that be amazing

(I spotted the bath of homemade oestrogen 🤢 🤮 and I’m disturbed I know what that is)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HNOZpyw_z18

Part 2 of Willy Mac’s Keffals exposé.

Not being a good week for Keffals. A popular gaming YouTuber (1million+ subscribers) did a full 1hr 30min dissection of the whole affair, largely with information highlighted by the Farms (but not mostly sourced from there).

Gah! I hit post before finishing typing. The long video is here:

But it goes beyond just that. A fairly progressive news station The Young Turks, has issued a very public retraction of previous endorsement of Keffels and this much shorter video catches many of the highlights from the longer one.

So that's Keffels. What about the much richer and more deeply connected Liz Fong Jones. Of "Consent Accident" fame?

Well, Josh has written a quite long article about the growing state of deep censorship of the Internet and why it's not just a KiwiFarms problem. I'll link it here, it's a pretty good read. Fair warning for the non-technical he does start off with that because he kind of has to, but the article itself is more about backroom conversations and who-knows-who connections.
Online Censorship's Institutional Power - by Joshua Moon (substack.com)

Sharing all this for the interested.

@Fruityful Thanks for posting the stuff to read and watch. I shall enjoy catching up on the drama 👍

I find the Cambridge University paper in the references a tad disturbing.

To a large extent it's bemoaning how hard it is to carry out vigilante justice when someone hasn't actually done anything illegal.

Yes, very you're hitting the nail on the head. It reminds me of the line: "People will tell you who they really are." Null calls it out in the article - they really are condoning illegal acts here. DDoS attacks (Distributed Denial of Service) work via spreading malware which repurposes people's computers to become part of a botnet which drowns out legitimate requests to a web server with bogus ones from the botnet. The fact it's a distributed network of computers making it hard to just ban the bogus requests by IP address. (Note - I'm not addressing this just to you as you may well know all this. I'm just writing generally as not everybody does). Whoever funded the DDoS attacks was putting money in the pockets of criminals who profit off distributing malware. It's the same people who will extort businesses to pay up or have their websites brought down. And they sound like they're seething that having been thrown to the wolves, Josh managed to fight them off by himself. The gist of their comments about Josh's technical skills seems to be "Well, it would have worked against anyone else".

And that's kind of the thrust of Josh's article - yes, it would have. And next time someone else could be "you".

I read an interesting post on KF a while ago, on why activists have not managed to kill KF. As far as the tech side absolutely that is down to Jersh's IT capabilities and PDAesque levels of 'shan't and you can't make me'.

But in terms of the will of the users to keep using and supporting KF, the poster persuasively argued that those who attack KF fundamentally misunderstand the site, what it is, how posters use it, and why.

KF users may be older, with more financial clout than assumed. The fundraising to force those making the untrue allegations of KF hosting child abuse images to recant demonstrated that.

KF users keep supporting KF because what it offers them - complete free speech - cannot be found anywhere else. It was posited that the attackers assumed KF users would just go somewhere else, and KF even if it got back up would have been superceded by whatever the somewhere else was. But there isn't a somewhere else online to get what KF offers, so that didn't happen. And because users know there isn't a somewhere else, they're loyal.

KF users aren't an organised group with any kind of purpose or goal other than being able to say what they want online. The fundraiser thread was full of posters saying that they'd been on KF for years but were seeing usernames there that they'd never interacted with. So you can't infiltrate KF and divert it from it's plans or purpose, because it hasn't got one.

I wish I could find the post as it was much more eloquent than this, but it made a lot of sense to me. KF isn't a load of terminally online incels in their mum's basement plotting against transpeople, and attackers who assumed it was didn't understand what they were dealing with.

I read some of the fundraising thread. The total was going up so quickly. There are many people out there that value free speech as a pillar of democracy and they are willing to put their hands in their pockets to defend it.

Well, Josh has written a quite long article about the growing state of deep censorship of the Internet and why it's not just a KiwiFarms problem. I'll link it here, it's a pretty good read. Fair warning for the non-technical he does start off with that because he kind of has to, but the article itself is more about backroom conversations and who-knows-who connections.

Yes it's a great article, my techy DP read it independently of me despite not ever visiting the farms or this thread so I think it's being fairly widely shared.

All these investigations of Keffals that have come out recently are hampered by the inability of the people making the videos etc to describe reality regarding people like Keffals. They always go for the framing of 'bad actor using the shield of a minority community to deflect criticism' rather than the truth which is that Keffals and Keffals’ antics are not that unusual in that online community.

The heated discussion on Reddit (mostly r/YouTubedrama I think) that the manly looking art used for Keffals by one of these "exposes" was "transphobic" kept me highly entertained for hours last week.

We’ve gone from ‘Drop Kiwifarms’ to ‘Actually, KiwiFarms had a point about Keffals’ in what, about 18 months?

Give it another year or so, I reckon the pronoun movement will be in tatters and reality will be restored.

It’s so funny watching the various YT hosts trying to explain the case that Keffals lied about The Farms - as well as them having to mention that The Farms isn’t doing anything illegal and that KF has done good research on a lot of people who are dodgy as feck - but still feeling the need to performatively say that they think KF shouldn’t exist cos the Farmers are transphobic to point out when people are grifting 🤷‍♀️🙄

Honestly, it seems that trying to stay within the guidelines of Identitarian politics is brain melting 🫠

@nothingcomestonothing
"I read an interesting post on KF a while ago, on why activists have not managed to kill KF. As far as the tech side absolutely that is down to Jersh's IT capabilities and PDAesque levels of 'shan't and you can't make me'."

So this is a fun little thing - Jersh is writing his own web forum software currently. I believe Xenforo which is the company that made the current forum software have refused him a licence although they can't retroactively take away his licence for the current aging version of the software (which he has already customised a lot). So he is writing his own forum software. From scratch. The man makes Sisyphus look like a quitter.

I wonder if MN would like to licence it when he's done! Would have proper quoting at last. ;)

"KF users aren't an organised group with any kind of purpose or goal other than being able to say what they want online. The fundraiser thread was full of posters saying that they'd been on KF for years but were seeing usernames there that they'd never interacted with. So you can't infiltrate KF and divert it from it's plans or purpose, because it hasn't got one."

Yeah, the Farms is expansive. You get people who spend their whole time there debating politics or culture in the Mass Debates section (Oh - I just got that!) and barely venturing into the LOLcow forums at all. Others might spend their time in the media section talking about TV. Others watching the LOLcows and reading about Vaush or Desmond Is Amazing (God help me - I should never, ever have to read that a sixteen year old kid has "retired from drag"). But they all have in common that they just want to be able to talk and read in peace. Some of what they want to talk about might be reprehensible but some of it vital. All of it is their right.

But here's what I think is an equally strong protection. Many places get taken over by Entryism. New people join, organise, change the place. As per the cartoon:

But with the Farms that's more difficult because the stigma is enormous. You can join some social group or hobby and Sea Lion the culture into something different. But the Farms is so beyond the pale for this sort of person, they wouldn't be caught dead signing up. (Well, except for the mysterious poster who was silent for years, suddenly posted a comment about bombing Keffels or Dong Gone which stayed up just for a few minutes long enough for a screenshot to be taken and then deleted their own comment - which was then used in a claim to Cloudflare that the forum presented an "immediate threat" and should be denied service). The Farm's reputation provides a measure of protection against Entryism, too.

"I wish I could find the post as it was much more eloquent than this, but it made a lot of sense to me. KF isn't a load of terminally online incels in their mum's basement plotting against transpeople, and attackers who assumed it was didn't understand what they were dealing with."

Yeah, they really don't understand their enemy at all. Also, a couple of years ago Jersh said that the largest demographic of new sign-ups was middle aged women. Heh!

But with the Farms that's more difficult because the stigma is enormous. You can join some social group or hobby and Sea Lion the culture into something different. But the Farms is so beyond the pale for this sort of person, they wouldn't be caught dead signing up.

Agreed, plus in other fora there is an enormous fear of being called phobic/backwards/not part of the cool new thing, it's such a laughably easy way to silence people and entryists have made huge gains that way. And on KF it doesn't work, at all. People will just call you a redacted swearword, you just can't use shame in the way you can everywhere else. It's kind of fascinating.

And the final arbiter is one man, whose posting instructions are 'just look at other posts, it's not fucking hard' not a team of mods who can be browbeaten or overthrown as we've seen elsewhere.

Cope and seethe, entryists.

'The man makes Sisyphus look like a quitter.'

Hand to god, I love how feckin thran thon wee gassun is! Thon could mind mice at a crossroads 😂 (⬅️ Irish slang expressing how impressive I find someone as stubborn as Null is in outwitting his detractors)

Is anyone else having problems accessing fresh milk from the farms?

Technical problems. The Chief Fruit is having to repack all the punnets which have fallen all over the floor. ;)

It's back up as of a few minutes ago. For complex reasons (not glossing over them to be patronising, merely to avoid a twelve paragraph post), a large spike in demand had a backlash effect on the database and it all went arse over tit. Null is having to restore from yesterday's backup but due to the size of the database and the fact he's apparently travelling this weekend, it's taken a little while.

And what caused the spike in demand? Apparently one of their favourite lolcows accidentally leaked video of himself sucking a cock. So next time someone tells you that the Kiwifarms is homophobic, tell them that the site was literally brought down by its userbase clamouring to see two men having sex.