Not at Voat apparently.
The theories are all over the place, like a blind man throwing darts, and upon some reflection I can see why. I have not been very visible lately and Voat has had some down time recently that raised the Voat Uncertainty Index (VUI) past 52 week highs. With the recent Facebook F8 conference and their announced plans to fully control and rate publishers while limiting content visibility in the name of making news more “trustworthy” (via AI based technology), places like Voat are increasingly more sought after. I often forget how much Voat means to you all and how much trust you've put into @Atko and I over the years.
About the recent downtime
I finally have a few minutes to explain what happened. This will not be an exciting tale but here is how this all went down. Since the port we’ve lost a few management tools that have monitored Voat and notified us if it was being bad, so take this into consideration.
Every AM and PM I check the site manually, I’ve done this every day for nearly 4 years (where is my cookie?), but I didn’t do this for an entire week (perhaps a week and a half). I went completely dark, turned off all notifications on my phone and didn’t even touch a computer and it was everything that I thought it could be. I did this because my mother was in town and I haven’t spent much time with her over the last few years. I decided to 100% disconnect from the virtual world in order that I could be fully present with her. She is an incredible person and life is short.
But then… like a perfect storm, the voat webserver ran out of disk space on the primary drive. This is what caused the downtime. It’s almost laughable (because it’s not the first time something this junior (can I say noob) has happened here at the High-Tech Capital of Free Speech).
Thank God superman @Atko was in between fixing catastrophic world events to fly over and fix Voat. He used his x-ray vision and nerves of steel to lift away the huge weight of unneeded log files in order to allow the webserver to breathe again (I'll never be a writer). I’m so glad Europe has a superman too.
TL;DR: Problem happened and @Atko fixed it. Send him praise.
While the decision to go dark was a huge plus for my family life, it was a choice that has caused a lot of distrust, uncertainty, and concern within the Voat community.
About me
I have been fairly burnt out lately (code related) and a bit down about Voat in general (I will perhaps write a post about this later), which is why I am not very visible lately. I've recently started pursuing further education and have dedicated myself to reading more.
I have been lurking though (and watching everyone like Big Brother /s).
I’m sorry about how things appeared, about not communicating earlier, and about the concern it caused. I'll also apologize for being short with a few people that were good to Voat over the years - that isn't the kind of person I want to be.
https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806
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Vindicator ago
PuttItOut, so glad to hear you spent some quality time away. Burnout is a terrible thing to carry. Sometimes, we just need a break.
Wherever you decide to go from here with Voat, you should be proud you have already changed the world and made it a better place.
I don't know how closely you follow pizzagate happenings, or the White House leaker known as "Q", but the thousands of threads of research posted by pizzagoats over the past year and a half and graciously and courageously hosted by you is constantly accessed by those attempting stop the trafficking of kids and fight elite corruption. Someone on 8chan called Voat "the largest knowledgebase of pedophile research and researchers in the world." We've become the place parents whose kids are being groomed come to find out how to get cops to do something about it. The place survivors come to put their stories on the record and make sense of the terrible things that have happened to them. The place folks can find now-scrubbed evidence of elite corruption and the network of interwoven relationships that protects it. I've been told repeatedly that people in high places are paying attention, and the fact that we're the most shilled spot on the internet leads me to believe it's probably true. With hundreds of resignations of powerful people, over 24,000 sealed indictments piled up, and some of the first ones unsealed having directly to do with elite child trafficking, I think the day is coming soon when your mom will be bragging to her friends about her son's free-speech website and the role it played in the Great Awakening. :-)
Vindicator ago
It's not just sealed indictments, resignations and arrests...our unrelenting free colonoscopies of Hollywood pedos may be bearing fruit as well. The Academy of Motion Pictures finally, after decades, has booted pedo Roman Polanski and Bill Cosby: https://voat.co/v/pizzagate/2529042.