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I personally feel sick about the Kolektiva situation. Couple of thoughts.

Whatever they did wrong, Kolektiva has provided a solidarity-space on the fediverse for those of the autonomous outlook, asking nothing in return (and not even bringing up donation requests very often). Thanks to them for that.

Questions remain about aspects of their opsec, in particular the use of unencrypted storage devices. Even a physically-seized drive may have held its secrets if it was encrypted at rest and not extracted onsite during the raid.

The timing of the announcement is also less than thrilling, though one assumes there are factors they can't discuss concerning this.

More broadly, this raises the issue of those of our philosophy eating their own dogfood. At first, the fact that anarchists claimed one of the larger instances on the fediverse as their own seemed to be a reason to wave the black flag. Yay, we're here.

But the Meta threat and this incident make clear that this approach has actually been in error. Kolektiva is a centralization - and it's also, frankly, not really horizontal.

Though it's not clear that this is the exact moment to do it, with P92 looming overhead, Kolektiva communards should perhaps consider breaking up into a more decentralized solidarity network on the fediverse, which would provide more resilience against technical failure, corporate enclosure, and state repression

#kolektiva