Interesting technical analysis, I will think about that some more, thank you. They are obviously somehow able to get replies despite the IP changing with literally every request and jumping beyond any normal IP bounds of any service like tor. I don't know exactly how it works. Honestly it's beyond anything I've ever seen, it may be some gov't tech, who knows. It's quite obviously not some dumb script kiddies, there's no question about that. They know what they are doing and have lots of software specifically for this. I have also seen they have software that does automated account registration, and automated comment and post deletion after a saidit account is banned. They're quite obviously well-prepared, and a lot of this was unleashed on day 1 of saidit's launch, wherein a group on reddit literally scanned /r/conspiracy for regularly-commenting usernames and then registered all those usernames on saidit in order to frustrate the migration and scare off new users. They registered something like 5,000 accounts in under a half-day, on saidit's opening day, before we turned on a more advanced captcha system.

Saidit basically had to become a cyber-fortress just to exist, I probably personally spent over 1000 hours just on saidit cybersecurity alone. I learned how to write Cloudflare API bash scripts that send self-autogenerated IP ban lists (which I also wrote a script for) from our server to the cloudflare server, without having to use the paid service, just to save money. D3rr and I used every trick we know to get saidit as secure as it is, and he's even better with this stuff than I am.

Basically my point is, this is a very high hurdle to jump over, and it's little wonder a lot of reddit alternatives implode quickly. You have to absolutely have your stuff together from day 1, or the site will be taken down from malicious attacks that are just free-floating around the internet. Most people can't do this, and most forums fail. Especially if the forum is related to anything controversial.

This itself is a way to stifle the free speech of the masses. You literally have to be a cybersecurity expert just to run a dang forum in 2023. And that's not even mentioning the actual code of just getting the thing running in the first place. And then the critical mass problem of attracting enough users. The hurdles are too high, so it's little wonder there are so few viable reddit alternatives. It's not a good state of affairs for the internet and culture in general. And with with the improving quality of automated AI posting and commenting on top of that, I worry about the future of anonymous text-based forums.