# The death of Kiwi Farms doesn't mean the end of free speech

published: 2022-08-28

My female readers, have you ever menstruated so hard that you butterfly-effect caused the downfall of one of the Internet's most notorious forums? One trash bin begets another, it seems.

A few days ago, Kiwi Farms went down because of another DDoS. I won't recount all of the details of what went down here because it's a tangled mess of disinformation on the mainstream news, trans-identified males making hormones to illegally disseminate to minors, and a long-running game of hot potato with Internet service providers. The important part is that, on the downtime update page that currently makes up the entire website, "Jersh" wrote the following:

> The mob has already planned subsequent targets. Should we stay down, they will then attack 'gender critical' communities - especially those ran by and for women. No place can exist online which allows criticism of their fetishistic lifestyle, and nothing would excite them more than this power and domination struggle being inflicted on a female space instead.

This has naturally whipped the users of Ovarit into a frenzy of wondering if they are next should Kiwi Farms be taken down, given that their site falls into the aforementioned category of "gender critical" and there have been (pitiful, but existent) attempts to "infiltrate" it in the past. Most of Ovarit's praise of Kiwi Farms centers around the collection of "receipts" (screenshots and other proof) of trans-identified individuals preying on minors and sexually harassing other members of society, with the occasional remembering of the racism, sexism, and other "-isms" rampant elsewhere on the site. I mean, hell, one only needs to listen to literally any episode of the admin's podcast to hear plenty of examples of why no self-respecting user of Ovarit (or anywhere, really) should touch Kiwi Farms with a ten-foot pole.

Personally, I am not concerned about a potential death of Kiwi Farms or that it would impact "free speech" on the internet for two reasons:

1. Joshua Moon, the admin of Kiwi Farms, has promised ad nauseam that, if Kiwi Farms were ever to go down permanently, he would zip the whole site up into a torrent and distribute it.

This would involve somehow flattening the database of XenForo (the current forum software Kiwi Farms runs, although they were in the process of moving to a different one developed by the admin) into static HTML pages. This solves the whole concern about, if Kiwi Farms disappears from the Internet, all the "receipts" and archives gathered on the site would disappear as well. Of course, this depends on Mr. Moon both keeping his promise and having the time and resources to be able to do this... which may not happen in the case of legal action happening against the site.

2. You all remember Tor exists, right?

I wrote a post earlier this year where I analyzed all the sites indexed by the Tor search engine Ahmia and found that a great deal of them were illegal pornography sites. One would think that this would be a major cause of concern for law enforcement, and yet police don't seem able to mobilize fast enough. (Not that I'm advocating for an increase in law enforcement power...) While DDoS attacks against Tor hidden services are still possible, so long as the admin takes pains to make themselves anonymous, the fact that hidden services cannot be easily, if at all, traced back to their hosting point of origin would negate many of the ways that Kiwi Farms has gone down over the years, mainly by bad actors contacting their hosting/domain providers and demanding that they drop the forum as a customer. Because `.onion` domains are not bought but instead generated by cryptography, there is no domain to be revoked and no financial penalty for switching to a new one should the Tor Project ever develop the ability to wholesale blacklist hidden services from being resolved on the network.

If one forum on the Internet dies, it does not logically follow that all free speech everywhere is suddenly revoked. I've seen mountains of evidence otherwise with my own eyes in the course of putting together Let's Decentralize. Plenty of sites that would immediately get nuked on the clearnet reside happily (well, as happy as hate-filled sites can be) and without issues on the darknet. So if you're truly worried about not being able to share receipts of predators without facing legal or physical threats from said predators, learn how to host a site on the darknet. Use Tor. Use I2P. Use Freenet if you can't afford keeping a computer online 24/7. Hell, even use ZeroNet in a VM if you have to. You have options, and lying down and crying about "muh freeze peach" and giving up is not a productive one.

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander