Welcome to the site. It's still very new and I'm hoping to get the wiki finalized today to push some of these questions that I anticipate will be common over time.

You're about to learn why I'm Rambler:

Where are the server/s hosted?

Love it or hate it, the USA still has the highest ranking freedom of expression anywhere in the world and great organizations that will fight tooth and nails to ensure that right continues to exists.

The concern most people have with the US is their data collecting, and it's a rightful and legitimate concern. When you consider options that fall outside of the 5/9/14 eyes of intelligence sharing you're severely limited to nations with weaker network infrastructures. But as I've mentioned before: What is even collected? You provide a (probably) random username upon sign up, a unique password to this site as you should for all sites. You do not need an email address.

What's interesting about being integrated in the various networks that we are on is that all Tor Onion Service traffic looks internal (EX: 172.0.0.1) so it's impossible to determine the difference between Tor_UserA and Tor_UserB. All LokiNet traffic looks internal as well (EX: 172.0.0.2) so all users on that network share the same IP and no way to tell the difference between Loki_UserA and Loki_UserB. The same can be said for I2P too, though that isn't running internally but all I2P network users will appear to be stemming from the IP of the I2P router, and from the router, I can't tell what's coming here and what's going elsewhere since it's pushing constant traffic through/around the I2P network. A bit more on a thread about our warrant cannary here

So in short: The USA. You can stay stuff in the USA that you can not say elsewhere. Even voat learned this lesson the hard way when their German host kicked them to the curb years ago. Don't confuse press index freedom with free speech. One is for the media, one is for you and me.

I have a very good relationship with my provider and know the owner personally and have for years. When this site launched I reached out to him and wanted to double, double check it was within their AUP considering we had someone wanting to list links to some Darknet Markets. His response was:

Dude,

If freedom of speech is your concern (which it sounds like), then you want to be in the States.

If you raise your arm the wrong way in Europe you'll get arrested.

Your site is perfectly fine and we have no problem defending freedom of speech.

There's a frickin' [redacted] article about us because we wouldn't shut some sites down.

They've been in business a very long time, own their own hardware and I've been a longtime customer of them for about 8 years now. Although I have a small list of go-to providers, they've always been my 'production quality' one.

Are there any kind of protection in place for disruption of service-attacks (primarily DDOS)

Absolutely. That's one of the reasons why I chose the company I did. They have a very strong network that can sustain multi-100Gbps DDoS attacks as I've experienced in the past when running a site that did not make some people happy. It hummed along (though albeit noticeable slower) while getting fucking hammered.

Is ramble a private undertaking or is it run by a company?

Private undertaking. I started it out of frustration towards big-tech. I started it because I'm unemployed and it's giving me something to do other than dwell on life. Although I am actively seeking work in my local area, the site will obviously remain online even if I'm not home within arms reach of a device to check it all day. There is no Ramble Incorporated. I don't want to sell ads. I want this site to remain as free as possible with no outside influence that isn't the community itself. (Ex: listening to the community) The servers are paid for until February, and when the time comes to renew I will renew again, out of pocket. If it ever comes to a point where I can no longer financially sustain the website out of pocket, I will probably ask for donations but we're not there yet. (With that said there is a donate link in the wik)

Although I am working on a side project / start up, it'll be Spring at the earliest (if lucky) that I could ever launch and it's not something that would interfere with this website and I'd prefer to keep the two things separate. Think of this more as my personal project where I want to remain relatively anonymous versus a professional project that'll have my name on it.

What are the short- and long term plans for Ramble?

Short term: Simply continue what we're doing. Be available through various networks, share content related to privacy, technology, and alterantive networks.

Long term: Hopefully wake some people up that big-tech is cancer and that their privacy is being invaded at almost every avenue online. Hopefully more people will start using and supporting the various anonymity networks as well as a means of preserving their privacy and helping these various networks grow. By just using this site, you and everyone else is helping push quality content to these networks that hopefully people will return to view and interact with.

Free speech and good opsec practices are just tools, just like using an anonymity network like Tor or I2P is a tool. Combined, you can stay pretty private online.

How do you plan to implement additional rules to the site? (Arbitrary admin decisions, community discussion etc).

I've been going back and forth on this as you don't want to start off with a bunch of rules but you also don't want to add rules later in response. It's hard to predict the future and what issues I may encounter, but let me say this:

• I've not banned a single user for anything they've posted. Shortly after this site opened someone decided to troll and post some gore and some out of context terms to replies. I PM'ed him and more or less told him that I removed his posts, he's not banned, and if he wanted to share images of gaping assholes and stab wounds and just say the N-word a bunch, be my guest, but please create the appropriate forums to do so.

So, I wouldn't really consider that heavy handed moderation or an attack on free speech. All mod logs are public on their respective forum via the sidebar and you can see why something was removed.

To put my philosophy in perspective: I got banned from the support forum and lost product support for the open source software powering this site because it's main coder does not support freedom of speech. She is a far far leftist and when grilling me on my stance on free speech I finally told her: I'd welcome a proud boy's forum just as much as I'd welcome an antifa forum. I don't have to agree with either personally, but as long as other people do, they deserve a place to discuss. Then I was banned for 'giving nazis a platform' or something and told the answer to any question I have via email will be, "No". Look, it's not illegal to be ignorant or hateful and talking about it. Funny, because even though I don't agree with her at all politically I had inquired about her thoughts on doing paid development for feature requests the community had made. I guess I'm the bad guy for tolerating people who aren't like me though, even if I don't like them. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

This is such a shitpost.

Voat was doomed the second their Azure cheapo licence ran out. Run a absolute free speech site on a super expensive system without long term funding plans?

Failure to plan is planning to fail, and here we are.

Nothing. There is no secure messengers or services that regular people use. Sure I'm on both Telegram and Signal but "it's another app!" to people. Fine, SMS or nothing then and don't expect me to respond to anything but the most satin of vanilla text. Fuck off with your Facebook messengers!

I want to love Briar so much, but as long as it doesn't support backup or exporting user data you're stuck on your current device.

There is literally no way of migrating devices without manually sending new contact info to everyone, you WILL lose everything in your profile and if you lose your phone?

"For journalists who needs security" - Well, I guess you just have to contact your secret sources directly again.

Yes, Briar is currently being worked on. But not the export/migration/backup system, the original issue ticked is FIVE YEARS OLD! Because of that I'm actively warning everybody about this critical issue.

For what it's worth, Briar GTK has direct messaging working on linux desktops.

I'm not a fan of Matrix after reading this:

https://wiki.404.city/en/XMPP_vs_Matrix

If I make the time, my new year's resolution is to get a LinuxFromScratch box up and running. From a skim of the book, it seems a bit tedious tho.

That would be a good tld.

It's still very new, just over a week old now.

Looks like I got here just in time! Well done with spreading the word though, I came here throug a ZeroNet post.

No, not listed there.

Really? It's not as annoying as recaptcha or hcaptcha imo.

At least notabug and dread are still alive. And ramble, but i don't think it's the same as the others. It's not as bad as reddit though.

Nice, looks like it's worth a review.

That's awesome. Thanks so much. It's a wonder that Bote works on mobile but disappointing that it no longer works on the desktop.

I've replied to your message.

Matrix is worth a look for sure.

But definitely check out Briar. https://briarproject.org/

Android only..

Briar is a powerful messaging tool with a brilliant design that runs over Tor only. Development is slow but ongoing and active. Briar is totally metadata resistant.

Currently Briar lacks the ability to make calls, transfer files etc so it is not feature rich. But all these things are under development.

But for basic totally secure messaging Briar is the Champ. Contact sharing is by mutual agreement and does not use address books, phone numbers etc so Briar is totally anonymous and of course fully encrypted.

Do check it it.

No problem. I added an edit and I believe you responded before I finished typing out the rest of my reply.

Thanks for clearing that up.

-Fish

I have the ability to exclude image uploads and the creation of new forums to only whitelisted members.

But everyone has that ability to create forums or upload pictures as of now since it's not been abused.

I could also have the wiki modifiable by either everyone, whitelisted members, or admin(s) (me). Right now only I can edit wiki pages.

Furthermore: Whitelisting will allow a user to bypass IP bans and some flood protections. Additionally, their IP addresses will no longer be stored. But if you're accessing the website via the Tor onion service, your IP shows the same as everyone else on the site accessing it via the Tor onion service. If you access the site via the LokiNet SNApp, it's basically the same. It's the same IP address shown for everyone using it. If you use the I2P site, it's the same IP regardless if it's me or you signed in. Because of that, those networks don't have flood limits now so it's like being whitelisted. Using Tor on the clearnet site will just be the IP of the exit-node obviously and the clearnet site by itself would be your identifiable IP unless behind a vpn. Those logs aren't kept anyway but I still encourage the use and support of any other network.

Tor, Yggdrasil, Loki and clearnet all play well together. The I2P service is off-server but could be on it, I suppose. But I just run a separate I2P router with the HTTP tunnel to the server that serves the clearnet, TOR, Loki and Yggdrasil sites.

Then it's just creating a config file for the webserver for each specific domain the site is accessible from and having it use the same document root.

I touched base on this briefly yesterday when answering a question about the warrant canary.

More people should do it. To push more content to any/all networks that they can in an effort to preserve privacy and to give big-tech the middle finger.

Out of curiosity, is the group/organization in question listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Organized_crime_groups_in_Brazil

dreads captcha has to be my least favourite. It’s creative but very very annoying.

Sorry, not sorry. LOL.

Today I Learned that error code 418 = "I'm a teapot" and error code 420 = "Enhance Your Calm"

Jesus. I kind of have to follow all the forums on this site (Plus I just browse All/new and I almost spit my drink out after I realized what I was looking at.

I tried it a few times and was disappointed. I was trying to create future addresses, export them and get the message later. Paste bin! Even under the best circumstances did not work for me. I use PyBitmessage, Retroshare, and other you did not hear about anyway (DaveMail).