dw_maintenance | Potential downtime this weekend (2 Sept

Potential downtime this weekend (2 Sept - 5 Sept)

Beginning this weekend (2 Sept - 5 Sept), users may experience short periods of site slowdowns or difficulty accessing the site. If you do have access issues, they shouldn't last long for you in particular, but the length of time where access issues are possible should last for about a week or so. We wanted to warn you in advance. You may not notice anything, or the site may be down, slow, or unreachable for you for brief periods. The exact length of downtime, and the total potential downtime window, will depend on your internet provider's settings.

This downtime is necessary to move our domain nameservice, our content delivery network (CDN) services, and our denial-of-service protection services away from Cloudflare, our current provider of those services. We've been discussing migrating away from Cloudflare recently due to their refusal to deny services to sites that endanger people's offline security and incite and target people for offline harassment and physical violence. That conversation became more urgent yesterday when, in a blog post about the campaign to encourage Cloudflare to behave more responsibly regarding the types of sites they enable to remain on the internet, Cloudflare's CEO revealed that they regret past enforcement actions where they closed the accounts of sites containing child sexual abuse material and sites that advocate for white supremacist terrorism.

We do not believe we can ethically continue to retain the services of a company that could write that blog post. As those of you who've been with us for a while know, our guiding principles involve supporting our users' expression to the maximum extent possible, and we reaffirm our commitment to protecting as much of your content that's unpopular but legal under US law as we can. However, we also believe it's more vital, not less, for a company with such free-speech maximalist views to have clear, concrete, and well-enforced policies regarding content that does cross their lines, including refusing to provide services to sites that actively incite and manufacture threats to people's physical safety, contain child sex abuse material, or advocate or instruct people how to conduct terrorism. That Cloudflare refuses to refuse services to those types of sites, and has expressed regret about the instances in the past where they have refused services to those types of sites, means we feel we can no longer ethically retain their services.

Things may be slightly bumpy for a bit as we make the transition and work to find the best replacements for the services we've been relying on Cloudflare to provide. We're very sorry for any slowdowns or downtime that may happen over the next week and a half or so, and we hope you'll bear with us as we make the move.

[EDIT: Because there are many of you and one of me, please check the comments before replying to see whether your issue has been addressed! Also, in accordance with the official DW community comment guidelines, please refrain from personal attacks, insults, slurs, generalizations about a group of people due to race/nationality/religion, and comments that are posted only to mock other commenters: all of those will be screened.]

[EDIT 7:12pm EDT: Because the temperature of many comments is frustratingly high, people don't seem to be reading previous replies before commenting as requested, and some people are just spoiling for a fight, I'm screening all comments to this entry by default while I can't be directly in front of the computer for the remainder of the day. We'll unscreen comments intermittently for the rest of the night as we have time, and I'll systematically unscreen all good-faith comments that don't contain personal attacks, insults, slurs, generalizations about a group of people due to race/nationality/religion, and comments that are posted only to mock other commenters when I return.]

[Edit 9/2 6:05pm EDT: having left comment screening on overnight, and seeing the percentage of abusive, bad-faith, or detached-from-reality comments, comment screening will remain on for this entry indefinitely. I'll keep an eye on it for another day or two and unscreen what needs to be unscreened, but probably not longer after that.]

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Thank you both for the heads up and for doing this. Intermittent downtime is definitely worth it.

Thank you.

This is why I've stuck with Dreamwidth for so long - LJ was getting unwieldy and difficult to use, and the less I say about their ethics the better.

Thank you.

I appreciate the dedication and the heads up. Thank you!

Edited 2022-09-01 19:35 (UTC)

Screened a comment (and its replies) on page 3 because of the use of an insulting term derived from a slur in it. The user then proceeded to ban me, so I can't do what I've done with other similar instances and reply publicly to the screened comment with the questionable language starred out, so I'm reposting it as a new thread so people can see the context of what I'm replying to:

you are disgusting ******* idiots like the most of your bunch? Big fucking surprise

We've published our Guiding Principles on every page of the site since we opened, and we evaluate everything we do as a business through that lens. Like every site that accepts user-generated content, we place some restrictions on that content, in order to remove spam, comply with US law, and remove material that can have concrete, offline harm. Our commitment to upholding the maximum amount of user expression possible, and the fact that we don't need to sanitize the service to what's acceptable to advertisers and investors, means that we draw those restrictions in different places than most other providers out there, but the restrictions exist and always will. This is necessary not only for us to stay within the boundaries of the law, but because a site that allows user-generated content without any sort of content policy that is clearly and consistently enforced drives away the people who are participating in good faith and leaves only the people who are there because their habitual conduct is harmful enough that they've been removed from every other service. That specifically contradicts our principle of maximal inclusion.

The questions of where to draw the line in content policy are all complex, multi-factor decisions that require careful balancing. We believe a company (such as ours) that specifically works to maximize the amount of user expression possible, including expression that would be banned on some or all other platforms, has a greater responsibility to carefully and thoughtfully examine those content policy questions and arrive at an answer that takes all those factors into account. Cloudflare's blog post yesterday indicated they believe they should not ask themselves those policy questions at all. That indicates that our company values and principles contradict with theirs so firmly we no longer believe we can ethically do business with them.

If you believe that your values and principles contradict the ones that we've demonstrated enough that you can't remain a DW user, we'll be sorry to see you go, but we'll absolutely support your right to do so, just like we're ending our relationship with Cloudflare. Everyone should evaluate the ethics and principles of the companies they have a relationship with regularly! If we aren't still suited to yours, I wish you the very best in finding your next online home and hope that you're able to locate one with a better match.

Thank you.

Good grief...thank you for breaking with the Freeze Peach Brigade and for telling us. I'm rarely here any more but I had to come comment to thank you for this action, it's rare for moral courage to win out over the ease of sweeping things under the rug and it proves you're genuine bricks over there.

Actual free speech actively requires deplatforming those whose only "side of the story" is trying to harm and/or silence others.

those whose only "side of the story" is trying to harm and/or silence others

DING DING DINGITY FUCKING DING WE HAVE A WINNER. THANK YOU.
Critical thinking, how do we shot it.

Thanks for standing by your principles, that’s rare these days

Hopefully it’s a smooth transition

Thank you for the thoughtful update! Best of luck with the transition.

I chucked at dw user [user name="necrophilia"] weighing in on this particular topic. Thank you for the laugh.

Welp, I'm getting paid tomorrow and getting a refund for a purchase that didn't pan out; I think it's time I re-uped my other paid account for this site.

Thank you for having the courage to stick to your principles. ♥

By the power granted to me as Some Guy In An Office, I declare this to be a Good Post about a Good Decision.

I'm also really impressed with the patience y'all are showing in the comments, even in response to people who are blatantly being disingenuous or even using slurs.

I know these are hot-button issues these days, and a lot of the public discussion is heated, partisan, and completely ignorant of the realities of actually running a service and wrestling with the extremely complex sorts of scenarios that arise. I'm always willing to explain the factors that go into our thinking! (We just ask people to participate in that discussion in good faith and without the use of slurs, personal attacks, or generalizations about entire groups of people, because those aren't conducive to a good-faith discussion -- that rule's been around since the start.) Reasonable people operating in good faith absolutely can come to different conclusions; the best we can do is explain our reasoning and let people make their own decisions from there.

I'm glad you're doing this.

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

===Good call, and thank you for all the amazing work you all do.

Thank you. This is an eminently sensible and ethical decision, and I hope that your new providers don't start making the same repellent choices Cloudflare is making.

Thank you. The way the internet in general is these days, it's really refreshing that a platform still exists with principles besides "make money."

Oh my goodness, thank you so much for moving away from Cloudflare. I'm royally ticked to say the least at their continued hosting of transphobic/transmisic sites, and your post adds significantly to my disgust. I haven't read the blog post, and I won't (I'm not giving them the traffic) but I dub them Cloudfail, summarily. :( Anyway, thank you for ditching their butts.

Should you or anyone else want to read the post without giving them the traffic, Wayback Machine has it.

Wayback Machine has fifteen of it, actually, even though it was published yesterday. Guess a lot of people had the same idea.