Reddit has banned many drug subs today

Can you elaborate so I can ask him about this? I know very little about programming.
I'm regurgitating second hand information that I barely understand myself but my sketchy memory of it is that in the background discord does some sort of handshake for verification using "tokens" which is like proprietary cookies or something and there was some vulnerability that was widely known at one point where people were easily able to duplicate or mimic these tokens I think by entering a private chat with you but you may have had to join a channel they adminned or something, I may be way off the mark too but it's worth asking him about he'd probably know more than me
 
Sounds like a solid plan hopefully the system he implements is more secure than discord tokens though
Discord is just IRC ( Internet Relay Chat ) with a pretty front end. It has little to no security due to it's underlying architecture. IRC (and Discord) was a horror to admin due to it's underlying lack of security. One should expect little to no security on Discord.
 
Discord is just IRC ( Internet Relay Chat ) with a pretty front end. It has little to no security due to it's underlying architecture. It was a horror to admin for due to it's underlying lack of security. One should expect little to no security on Discord.
Didn't realise it was just IRC with a modern GUI but makes sense given what I seem to remember about the awful issues
 
No, because I don’t like forced anonymity.
It really does bring out the worst in people to never have anything they say be traced back to them. Smaller profiles of just words and thoughts of an individual are a nice middle ground between making a cesspool of douchebags and having every part of everyone's personal information available like traditional social media.
 
Good! I want to start a censorship free (excluding truly heinous stuff like CP) mega forum to rival Reddit but people tell me it won’t succeed. I despise Reddit.
Be careful what you wish for. I did this a few years ago and it ruined my life. Feds showed up at my house and I was not allowed to touch any device connected to the internet for the last couple of years. I only got out of legal trouble a few months ago and it cost every penny I had. The internet is theirs and if you do get lucky enough like I did to attract an actual user base they'll attack it through various means then they'll come to your house and make demands if manage to defend against it. In my case I was arrested for refusing to hand over access to the servers. Which they got anyway since they weren't under my direct control (leased dedicated servers in a data center). Then they used the access they had to my ISP provided modem/router combo to send packets through to another public forum and I spent the last two years attempting to prove a frame job.

They don't fuck around. Enjoy what little "freedom" of speech you still have while it lasts. Because it won't for much longer.
Discord is just IRC ( Internet Relay Chat ) with a pretty front end. It has little to no security due to it's underlying architecture. IRC (and Discord) was a horror to admin due to it's underlying lack of security. One should expect little to no security on Discord.
IRC is just a protocol and isn't inherently secure or insecure. Each daemon that powers the various IRC servers around the world support different things and security methods. Nothing can be secure because the NSA has backdoors in all the consumer and enterprise hardware now. None of the random number generators everything like PGP relies on are truly random (like /dev/urandom on the UNIX-clones for example).

Most of these chat applications are all re-implementations or straight copies of the IRC protocol though. For good reason; it works. AIM, ICQ, Skype, Discord and all the others are the same thing. If they offer VOIP services the way those work can differ. But again just copies of existing well known protocols.

Any kid can "hack" a discord server by pressing F12 in their browser. The Discord "application" is just Google Chrome bundled with a webpage. I don't use the service (except through interacting with some users on it through IRC bridges in certain channels) but I've played around with their "webapp". I was able to see all the so-called "hidden" channels on a "server" in about 5 minutes by sniffing around with the usual tools. I could probably read another user's messages and listen to their voice chat in real time if I put in the effort and cared to do it. But the same is true for most any web-based service. For example, I could read PMs here with like 10 minutes of work if I really wanted. But I'm intimately familiar with the software used here (and the two that were used before) so that's not really a knock on this place. That's just how things are when messages are required to be stored as plaintext in the a database to be useful to anyone. Not really a knock on the forum software either since there are about 1,000 ways to gain that type of access when you know how everything works from the kernel on down.

Unless you're holding meetings in a Faraday cage with only trusted participants you should not expect to have any privacy what-so-ever in this life. Even then it just takes one slip up for everything to be leaked out and recorded forever. Going deep into the woods doesn't help much either. But I digress and don't really feel like explaining what type of madness DARPA and friends have polluted the spectrum with at the moment. I'll just leave it at this: those hearing voices aren't crazy and the system works in both directions. Anyone that's been hit with it knows how horrible of a weapon it is and the people maintaining that system should be ashamed of themselevs.

Also. Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated
 
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Be careful what you wish for. I did this a few years ago and it ruined my life. Feds showed up at my house and I was not allowed to touch any device connected to the internet for the last couple of years. I only got out of legal trouble a few months ago and it cost every penny I had. The internet is theirs and if you do get lucky enough like I did to attract an actual user base they'll attack it through various means then they'll come to your house and make demands if manage to defend against it. In my case I was arrested for refusing to hand over access to the servers. Which they got anyway since they weren't under my direct control (leased dedicated servers in a data center). Then they used the access they had to my ISP provided modem/router combo to send packets through to another public forum and I spent the last two years attempting to prove a frame job.

They don't fuck around. Enjoy what little "freedom" of speech you still have while it lasts. Because it won't for much longer.

IRC is just a protocol and isn't inherently secure or insecure. Each daemon that powers the various IRC servers around the world support different things and security methods. Nothing can be secure because the NSA has backdoors in all the consumer and enterprise hardware now. None of the random number generators everything like PGP relies on are truly random (like /dev/urandom on the UNIX-clones for example).

Most of these chat applications are all re-implementations or straight copies of the IRC protocol though. For good reason; it works. AIM, ICQ, Skype, Discord and all the others are the same thing. If they offer VOIP services the way those work can differ. But again just copies of existing well known protocols.

Any kid can "hack" a discord server by pressing F12 in their browser. The Discord "application" is just Google Chrome bundled with a webpage. I don't use the service (except through interacting with some users on it through IRC bridges in certain channels) but I've played around with their "webapp". I was able to see all the so-called "hidden" channels on a "server" in about 5 minutes by sniffing around with the usual tools. I could probably read another user's messages and listen to their voice chat in real time if I put in the effort and cared to do it. But the same is true for most any web-based service. For example, I could read PMs here with like 10 minutes of work if I really wanted. But I'm intimately familiar with the software used here (and the two that were used before) so that's not really a knock on this place. That's just how things are when messages are required to be stored as plaintext in the a database to be useful to anyone. Not really a knock on the forum software either since there are about 1,000 ways to gain that type of access when you know how everything works from the kernel on down.

Unless you're holding meetings in a Faraday cage with only trusted participants you should not expect to have any privacy what-so-ever in this life. Even then it just takes one slip up for everything to be leaked out and recorded forever. Going deep into the woods doesn't help much either. But I digress and don't really feel like explaining what type of madness DARPA and friends have polluted the spectrum with at the moment. I'll just leave it at this: those hearing voices aren't crazy and the system works in both directions. Anyone that's been hit with it knows how horrible of a weapon it is and the people maintaining that system should be ashamed of themselevs.

Also. Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated
Thank you for sharing. If I do pursue this, I’ll try to avoid some of those pitfalls as best I can. What country do you live in and where were your servers hosted?
 
Thank you for sharing. If I do pursue this, I’ll try to avoid some of those pitfalls as best I can. What country do you live in and where were your servers hosted?
I live in USA and my servers were located in USA due to the rather lax laws on content/speech. Sadly, there have been several decrees and federal laws passed as of late that have made what used to be allowed speech into illegal speech. We had a very lax attitude towards users (you can host whatever here, you run your own sub-forums, admins do not get involved in your forum) but we found ourselves flooded with refugees and users from the great purges that happened during the end of 2019-2020. So over night we gained a lot of users and had to spend a lot of money buying new servers and refactoring our software to support them.

When they came they brought a lot of attention with them. So after about a week of good times we found ourselves flooded with bots, bad actors and federal agents. All of which would post illegal content 24/7 then try to offer their services as moderators and demand rule changes. If you did try to crack down on things with a minor rule change they'd then turn around and concern troll. They basically only existed to rile up the real users and attempt to make them leave. They learned the sleeping habits of moderation pretty quickly and would wait until we were asleep to flood the place with various types of content I'd rather not talk about. Every night there were floods of it. If I adjusted my sleeping habits to deal with it they'd just re-learn them and flood again whenever I did try to snooze.

I am convinced it's impossible to both grow a community organically beyond about 10 users now or moderate it. We had several instances of people signing up for moderating duties that were just fine when we were watching them but would cause havoc as soon as they were left alone. Only to jump to a new IP range when their access was revoked and try to do it all over again. Along with a constant flood of people trying to hack into the servers and short of that launching DDOS attacks. Whoever was doing it had unlimited access to resources and domestic IP addresses. If you blocked one IP range on a temp. basis they'd just switch to another that shared IP range with most of the domestic ISPs within the three-four countries most of our users were from. It took them about 3 months to turn the place into a ghost town. At our height we were serving over 1 million users daily. Which is pretty impressive considering it was set-up for about 20 initially and we never expected it to attract more than that. But when some large platforms got taken down during the havoc that was late 2019 tons of people showed up with no other place to go because censorship was already so oppressive most everywhere else.

You will toe the line these days or you will find yourself in a similar situation to what we faced. I wasn't the only one that got a knock at the door. The other two main admins did too and they lived overseas. We didn't even host what I would have considered very controversial topics at the time. This place wasn't becoming a watering hole for every covid conspiracy theorist or anything like that. It was just uncensored non-political discussion about various topics.

One thing I should mention; When they came to talk to me (and I shouldn't have talked to them at all) they mentioned a certain family by name and seemed very interested in that particular area of discussion. At the time there were what I guess about 20-50 regular users that were following the opioid lawsuits very closely and discussion got heated. To the point where some of them were tracking the daily comings and goings of that family. I got the impression that they were very pissed off about that and used their money+power as a flex to send the authorities to scare me. Basically; "We know where you live now. It'd be a shame if something happened to your family".

I have been involved with running forums and other discussion platforms on the internet since the mid-90s. I've owned and help run several websites larger than BL and even larger than the one I was operating in late 2019-early 2020. Some of which had more controversial discussion than this one did. I've had to deal with law enforcement multiple times over the years. But never anything like this.

In the end they seized my domain names, servers and ran it as a honeypot for several months afterwards. I yanked down the warrant canary that was hosted on a backup domain they didn't get access to right away. Technically that wasn't against the law but they argued that I'd violated the law when I did that because I was under a gag order after they seized everything. I suspect it was also them that routed data through my LAN. Since that caused me a lot of trouble that I'd rather not discuss. Suffice to say though the Federal Government claims they consider my penis as a deadly weapon and that I threatened someone with it. The only thing they could have had access to on that network was the ISP supplied modem+router combo. Since everything beyond it was locked down tight behind an OpenBSD powered firewall running on old hardware that's claimed not to have back doors in the CPU. I did audit everything on my LAN and nothing was broken into that I could see. But it's easy enough to purge log files once you gain root so I didn't really trust any of that hardware afterwards.

Not that I got to keep it for much longer. It was only about 2 weeks after they seized my servers that they came back with a warrant and seized all my personal hardware. In addition they harassed my entire family including people that didn't live in the same household. Along with several of my friends and associates. I spent some time in county jail (no prison thank God) and was released on probation with a stipulation that I was not allowed to touch a keyboard for 2 years. The Government basically ruined my life because I gave people a place to talk on the internet that didn't practice any form of censorship. We had 2 rules: Don't post anything that is illegal under US law (3 things basically) and don't be an asshole. Beyond that you could run your own section however you pleased or say whatever you wanted. If you didn't like how someone ran their section we'd give you your own. We started with 4 sub-forums and within a few weeks we had thousands (most hidden) being used by millions of people. Can't give you exact numbers on users because we encouraged people to use tor, VPNs, and didn't require logging into an account to participate (unless a section decided to restrict access like that).

I will never attempt to run a forum again. I am convinced it's impossible now to run any place with meaningful discussion on the web now. If you're interested in this I would advise attempting to do it outside of http protocol. The only places left that aren't really being watched like a hawk and not instantly flooded with bot farms are stuff like Fidonet, old school BBS systems and maybe USENET. The web itself is broken for a variety of different reasons. Main one being if you don't put your stuff behind a CDN you can expect constant DDOS attacks. But all CDNs require handing over your TLS/SSL keys making any "encryption" effectively useless and broken. We got around this by buying several VPSs and setting up our own CDN. But it cost a lot of money.

Good luck. I hope you have better luck than I do.
 
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I live in USA and my servers were located in USA due to the rather lax laws on content/speech. Sadly, there have been several decrees and federal laws passed as of late that have made what used to be allowed speech into illegal speech. We had a very lax attitude towards users (you can host whatever here, you run your own sub-forums, admins do not get involved in your forum) but we found ourselves flooded with refugees and users from the great purges that happened during the end of 2019-2020. So over night we gained a lot of users and had to spend a lot of money buying new servers and refactoring our software to support them.

When they came they brought a lot of attention with them. So after about a week of good times we found ourselves flooded with bots, bad actors and federal agents. All of which would post illegal content 24/7 then try to offer their services as moderators and demand rule changes. If you did try to crack down on things with a minor rule change they'd then turn around and concern troll. They basically only existed to rile up the real users and attempt to make them leave. They learned the sleeping habits of moderation pretty quickly and would wait until we were asleep to flood the place with various types of content I'd rather not talk about. Every night there were floods of it. If I adjusted my sleeping habits to deal with it they'd just re-learn them and flood again whenever I did try to snooze.

I am convinced it's impossible to both grow a community organically beyond about 10 users now or moderate it. We had several instances of people signing up for moderating duties that were just fine when we were watching them but would cause havoc as soon as they were left alone. Only to jump to a new IP range when their access was revoked and try to do it all over again. Along with a constant flood of people trying to hack into the servers and short of that launching DDOS attacks. Whoever was doing it had unlimited access to resources and domestic IP addresses. If you blocked one IP range on a temp. basis they'd just switch to another that shared IP range with most of the domestic ISPs within the three-four countries most of our users were from. It took them about 3 months to turn the place into a ghost town. At our height we were serving over 1 million users daily. Which is pretty impressive considering it was set-up for about 20 initially and we never expected it to attract more than that. But when some large platforms got taken down during the havoc that was late 2019 tons of people showed up with no other place to go because censorship was already so oppressive most everywhere else.

You will toe the line these days or you will find yourself in a similar situation to what we faced. I wasn't the only one that got a knock at the door. The other two main admins did too and they lived overseas. We didn't even host what I would have considered very controversial topics at the time. This place wasn't becoming a watering hole for every covid conspiracy theorist or anything like that. It was just uncensored non-political discussion about various topics.

One thing I should mention; When they came to talk to me (and I shouldn't have talked to them at all) they mentioned a certain family by name and seemed very interested in that particular area of discussion. At the time there were what I guess about 20-50 regular users that were following the opioid lawsuits very closely and discussion got heated. To the point where some of them were tracking the daily comings and goings of that family. I got the impression that they were very pissed off about that and used their money+power as a flex to send the authorities to scare me. Basically; "We know where you live now. It'd be a shame if something happened to your family".

I have been involved with running forums and other discussion platforms on the internet since the mid-90s. I've owned and help run several websites larger than BL and even larger than the one I was operating in late 2019-early 2020. Some of which had more controversial discussion than this one did. I've had to deal with law enforcement multiple times over the years. But never anything like this.

In the end they seized my domain names, servers and ran it as a honeypot for several months afterwards. I yanked down the warrant canary that was hosted on a backup domain they didn't get access to right away. Technically that wasn't against the law but they argued that I'd violated the law when I did that because I was under a gag order after they seized everything. I suspect it was also them that routed data through my LAN. Since that caused me a lot of trouble that I'd rather not discuss. Suffice to say though the Federal Government claims they consider my penis as a deadly weapon and that I threatened someone with it. The only thing they could have had access to on that network was the ISP supplied modem+router combo. Since everything beyond it was locked down tight behind an OpenBSD powered firewall running on old hardware that's claimed not to have back doors in the CPU. I did audit everything on my LAN and nothing was broken into that I could see. But it's easy enough to purge log files once you gain root so I didn't really trust any of that hardware afterwards.

Not that I got to keep it for much longer. It was only about 2 weeks after they seized my servers that they came back with a warrant and seized all my personal hardware. In addition they harassed my entire family including people that didn't live in the same household. Along with several of my friends and associates. I spent some time in county jail (no prison thank God) and was released on probation with a stipulation that I was not allowed to touch a keyboard for 2 years. The Government basically ruined my life because I gave people a place to talk on the internet that didn't practice any form of censorship. We had 2 rules: Don't post anything that is illegal under US law (3 things basically) and don't be an asshole. Beyond that you could run your own section however you pleased or say whatever you wanted. If you didn't like how someone ran their section we'd give you your own. We started with 4 sub-forums and within a few weeks we had thousands (most hidden) being used by millions of people. Can't give you exact numbers on users because we encouraged people to use tor, VPNs, and didn't require logging into an account to participate (unless a section decided to restrict access like that).

I will never attempt to run a forum again. I am convinced it's impossible now to run any place with meaningful discussion on the web now. If you're interested in this I would advise attempting to do it outside of http protocol. The only places left that aren't really being watched like a hawk and not instantly flooded with bot farms are stuff like Fidonet, old school BBS systems and maybe USENET. The web itself is broken for a variety of different reasons. Main one being if you don't put your stuff behind a CDN you can expect constant DDOS attacks. But all CDNs require handing over your TLS/SSL keys making any "encryption" effectively useless and broken. We got around this by buying several VPSs and setting up our own CDN. But it cost a lot of money.

Good luck. I hope you have better luck than I do.
Are there going to be a flood of redditugees?
 
Oh wow I just checked and they just banned one of the kratom extract (7-hydroxymitragynine) subs I used to go on sometimes. There’s also another one for ‘quitting7oh’ that is for people withdrawing from kratom extracts with a post saying “watch out guys they are banning subs and we may be next” … I wonder what the heck is going on?
RFK Jr is involved in a conspiracy, but not like his Uncles. I am telling you that granola eating straight edge hippie is up to something.
 
Wouldn't be surprised if the temp bans of the subs were somehow part of a database copying process for law enforcement or something. I doubt it was an "error."
 
Are there going to be a flood of redditugees?
They'll flock to Discord or Bluesky where they can ban open Disso/Deliriant users from having any opinion. When I was still there you couldn't even post trip reports on /r/DXM If had any mention of DPH, Too thick to get NMDA antagonism alone will inhibit M1 activity at 250 ~ 650mg.
 
The orange thing is behind this; he's a Russian asset. Just another way of targeting people on the left. (Hail to the Queen, a fascist regime)
 
dayum, r/meth is still up tho lmao

No its not there is no way. I was a moderator on there! Isn't up but it's like private and you have to get approved to do anything on it. That basically takes away the fun of the sub reddit, I doubt people post as much. People just got on there too post pics of shard post pics of there dicks. GOATED reddit sub though. r/heroin was beastly too, that one is banned for sure.

I get that it's like discussion of illegal stuff but shoudn't all information be documented just like history? They have been going after dark web reddit subs too. Reddit is allegedly the information hub of the world. There not Reddit sucks. They will censor whatever to get their monitization they don't care at all.
They banned me I dont remember why. I probably said something really horrible to someone.

Dread is the prime free information source reddit but most people just use it for drugs. 420chan was amazing too but they are struggling to be hosted by a ip host i believe.
The internet is a rip off these days.
 
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