I know that some of you may be scared and afraid of this place being taken offline, but as of right now, I can come out and confidently say that this will not happen.
We have contingency plans in the case that something is suspended or taken away from us, such as daily backups, alternative/mirror domains, and alternate providers. If Cloudflare dropped us, we could be back up in a matter of minutes. If our hosting provider dropped us, we could be back up in a matter of hours, and if our domain is suspended, we could switch to an alternative domain in a matter of minutes. We have been planning for the worst for years, and we are confident even if they coordinated all those takedowns at the same time (which is very unlikely), we could be back online within 24 hours. Knowing what I know today compared to 2 years ago, we are in a much better position today than ever before.
Groups like FixThe26 realistically can't do anything to this community or any of our members, legally or otherwise. If they had the power and support to take us down, we wouldn't be here today. They know that they can't take us down through legal means, so they have resort to bullying and harassing our members. One member, in particular, was harassed and bullied on Twitter to the point of tears and possibly killing themselves prematurely, which makes me very upset.
I do get where these grieving parents are coming from, and I imagine that losing your child to suicide is the worst feeling in the world, but taking down our community isn't going to prevent suicide. In fact, it might just make matters worse. As a community, you all have been supportive of other members and have helped many through the worst of times. Personally, I have not observed an instance where someone has encouraged someone to take their life. Even in Shawn's goodbye thread, there was no one encouraging her to take her own life, contrary to what the media and her mother says.
They have been trying to paint every single member here as a pedo, child trafficker, murderer, or sadist when that's clearly not the case. They'll continue to take us out of context, screenshot our posts, and try to frame what people say in the worst possible light regardless of what we say or do. Their goal isn't about finding the truth; it's about taking us down by any means necessary, including trying to get us to turn against each other.
As for Twitter, I made a Community Poll gauging the opinion of the community on us having a Twitter account, and I believe that debating with FixThe26 is not productive. Debating with those that will twist your opinion no matter what you say will never lead to anything good. Fighting fire with fire never ends well, and I do agree with much of the sentiment that was expressed in the poll and the thread. This is why I have cleaned our Twitter timeline and blocked FixThe26 along with their affiliates. I believe most of the sentiment against us keeping our account is related to us drawing unwanted attention that could get us to shut down, or that it's not productive and I still do agree with those points to an extent. I also believe that we should still maintain a social media presence for site updates and to interact with people but not with people like FixThe26 and their affiliates.
Interacting with these people have made many people's mental health worse, mines included. I was against having a Twitter presence at the start of this forum for many reasons, but the most important reason was that we didn't want to draw unwanted attention to this community. Unfortunately, this ended up happening due to the media being dishonest about this community and its members. We want to remain true to this community main purpose: To give people a place to vent, to talk freely about suicide and the issues surrounding it.
After speaking to a few other moderators, we believe it is best to keep and maintain the Twitter account following the guidance I set above.
We survived previous media onslaught almost completely unscathed, and we will survive this one too. Their endeavors will ultimately be fruitless and produce no results. There have been many people that have tried to take our website down by sending abuse complaints and even by illegal means (DDoS attacks), and they have failed in keeping us offline.
Our website will remain online, and we will continue to keep this community together, no matter what comes our way.
