>>29071
Difficult to know until we find out how it happened.

How active even is 4chan these days? It's got to be about 10 years since I was a regular visitor.

>Liz Truss to launch ‘uncensored’ social network to counter mainstream media
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/apr/15/liz-truss-to-launch-uncensored-social-network-to-counter-mainstream-media

The internet is saved.

>>29072
Supposedly, an especially embittered emigrant on soyjak.party, the community that got /qa/ closed down, found a way in over a year ago and just sat there for a year before unleashing all this. The 4chan servers are on such a shoestring budget that they hadn't even updated their version of PHP since 2016, and so this hacker just looked up some unpatched exploits that nobody was ever going to fix because you should just upgrade PHP to a version without those issues. But 4chan never did this, and eventually this hacker decided to reopen /qa/ and fuck around generally, posting as Hiro (the elusive current owner of 4chan) and doxxing the entire moderation staff.

There's a thread on soyjak.party about the hack, but so many people went there that the site crashed. There is an archive link in one of the news sites I looked at, but I can't find it now.

To answer OP's question, I don't think the Internet will change at all, because Twitter/X is basically 4chan now. And while cybersecurity experts are saying it could be some time before 4chan comes back online, I am confident that it will be back in the next few days. The only concern then would be if 4chan can operate as a going concern if its advertisers pull out, but it has next to no advertisers anyway so I can't see that mattering. Most adverts I see there are for OnlyFans pages, while a more interesting advert would be a random poster on the site paying $20 to write "fuck jannies" at the top of their favourite board. The biggest cost would surely be the bandwidth, of which 4chan is of course currently using zero. I also expect a number of the people who got doxxed to leave the site in protest, so they will undeniably need to be replaced by other FBI and CIA interns and that will take time too.

Really, 4chan is just another site in most ways now. Pepe the Frog and Donald Trump are mainstream political forces, and I swear it's been years since someone livestreamed a school shooting or posted photos of a murder they just committed. I don't know where the proper psychos have moved to, but 4chan is operating on so many levels of perpetual irony that it's impossible to take anything posted there seriously a lot of the time. Real woman-haters are probably outnumbered by ironic woman-haters 10:1.

>>29075
>There is an archive link in one of the news sites I looked at, but I can't find it now.
I've found it. It does contain images of the hack, and links to other pages where all the doxxed people's email addresses are, so if this is an unwise thing to post, feel free to delete it but please only give me a very short ban because I currently have nowhere else to go.

https://archive.is/2GfKK

I've been mulling over my feelings regarding the, potential, death of 4chan for a little while now. Actually, that's untrue, I've been mulling over my thoughts, my feelings were an immediate sense of wholesale apathy, marked only by the slight sense of empathy for the micro communities that probably still persisted there. Besides those edge cases, the great mass of 4chan had been crap for years and, moreover, its culture has already seeped out into the wider internet to make the downfall of 4chan itself irrelevant.

If "brainrot" content has a common evolutionary ancestor it's /b/, the general tone of not terribly bright people taking nothing seriously is writ large at the highest levels of the US government, and, like an invasive species no one can get a handle on, 4chan lives on through it's 1,000 young, from x.com, to soyjak.party, to this place.

I realised too late I was just paraphrasing what >>29075 had already said later in that post. Nevertheless, the reason I don't care about the hack is because it's been dead for years, as far as I'm concerned. By the end of 2019 I was done with 4chan and even being in lockdown didn't push me back in. It was also obvious even back then that the post-m00t regime didn't give a shit. Beyond that, not only had I changed, but the site was far more tedious, repetitive and tiresome than it had been. And so it's some fine irony that it's been taken offline by a combination of managerial negligence and a pack of obsessive top lads. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a more fitting end, if it is the end, than this.

If it dies I'll miss how each board had its own culture and memes that would be meaningless to others. Except /v/ I guess which post-Gamer Gate just became complaining about blacks and women in video games. That's a bad culture.

/lgbt/ and /pw/ have been my recent favourites. /pw/'s forced memes are funny (Chez, Kevin Nash summer of '92, Hogwheels, KWABOTY); and /lgbt/ is quite insightful to see how "normal" trans people think of the current state of things with regards to the politics of gender identity and Trump's crackdown on them.

I feel like any successor to 4chan will be more influenced by the /pol/ chuds and negative elements of the site, so the community of /lgbt/ might never get a new home.

>>29078
Maybe/sp/ just couldn’t make KWABOTY and the hot summer of 1992 funny, but I always hated both of those. Especially since my beloved /147/ threads on /sp/ were clearly the real KWABOTY after we failed to get both the 147000000 GET and the 147147147 GET. I think /147/ said we’d move to Ylilauta in the event of a 4pocalypse, but I went there a couple of weeks ago while we were discussing it and it’s very hard to enjoy an imageboard that’s all in Finnish.

Anyway, I just checked and 4chan is still down. That’s over 24 hours now. Isn’t there a critical point where if an online community is offline for too long, it never recovers? I swear it’s 2-3 days or something like that.

I miss being able to scan some complete bollocks during my day. You lot can be elitist all you want but it feels like something good was still on there even amongst a sea of shit.

>>29080
If not wanting you to take daily dips into a sea of shit makes me an elitist then so be it.

I do miss some reading the /brit/ and it's variants on /r9k/ and /pol/, I'm ashamed to admit it but I've met people I've met up with in real life through those.

>>29080
I'm not being elitist. I love 4chan.

>>29082
Okay, so I don't love all of 4chan. I have posted there many times that /brit/ is the absolute worst part of the entire site. I will happily be elitist against /brit/, because it was awful.

what the fuck happened to /b/? I dropped off the net for a handful of years - when I returned /b/ was full of porn and little else.

>>29084
It's highly speculated to be 99% bot spamming. Hiro really didn't give a shit about the communities on 4chan or the cultures of the boards and was content to let the site rot. rather than deal with the bot spamming he just took the operators pass money.

>>29085
But surely it was losing money? If money was being made, you’d think someone would have campaigned a little harder to update PHP to a version from this decade.

>>29086
How much could a server cost, Michael, ten dollars?

>>29085
I think Hiro gets a lot of flak for things that started under Moot. It's a Lenin-Stalin relationship.

/b/ died when the churn of quality old-new users was disrupted by the emergence of sites like rudgwicksteamshow.co.uk, Facebook and twitter along with its own popularity as normies started using the internet more. But it meant that the various boards took on increasing importance even if they were all usually at their best when they didn't discuss their own subject matters.

Bots, spammers and shameless astroturfing became a growing problem for 4chan even in the early days (not to excuse Hiro being a lazy and corrupt fucker) but I think it's almost universally agreed across 4chan's daughter boards that it also suffered from moderation policies that didn't police low-quality content and when it did it was clearly cliques with their own interests doing it. /k/ was an interesting example of this as it generally had strong moderation but was clearly organised around an agenda.

I don't think anyone is ever going to agree on the story of 4chan. Future historians might reference Arsepisser et al. but it's just going to be one footnote.

Are there any vaguely decent alternative chans that aren't full of carpet-baggers?

This place is an exception obviously.

>>29089
Here's a list: https://allchans.org/2025/04/16/4chan-alternatives/

One of the ones listed is soyjak.party, hilariously. And this site isn't on there.

>>29090
>And this site isn't on there.

Probably for the best.

>>29089
ernstchan.top/int/

I don't know, man. I miss Krautchan. It's going to be a long weekend for a lot of us.

>>29071
Some tech wizard anon once made some very thorough infographics that showed that 4chan was being maintained by one of the USA intelligence agencies
I very much doubt it can be hacked by random people - if it's been taken down then there is a reason
Perhaps they have just decided to finally prune the platform completely
There are the recent developments with the DOGE budget slashing in the US government
It would make sense that this new initiative would want to cut off a dummy website full of the lowest possible tier of spies wasting time trying to poorly refashion insane hand drawn memes and pretending to be teenagers
You would have real offices with real people being paid wages to shit up 4chan
Pointlessly convoluted bureaucracy with a vague mission statement that can't even be achieved, and nothing to really show for their work after years, just wading through absolute pure shit day in day out
If the budget for 4chan was downstream of a billion dollar per year internet shilling campaign program and the whole plan had been pruned out from the roots then 4chan would suddenly vanish along with whatever else it was attached to

Are you alright lad?

>>29102
I didn't realise it was posting and I kept clicking
I'm used to the act of posting causing a refresh of the page

>>29093
Well it's obviously not. The critical vulnerability predates DOGE and was in place for a year.

While everyone knows the feds use imageboards it makes no sense to step in and actually run the operations when they could, if they're motivated to move beyond bots and third-worlders, bribe/infiltrate the moderation. But even then it's more of a Russian and Chinese game.

>>29093
>Some tech wizard anon once made some very thorough infographics that showed that 4chan was being maintained by one of the USA intelligence agencies
What a load of horseshit.

>>29106

I could believe it. We underestimate the amount of nonsense work intelligence agencies actually do. It's a common refrain that social media and the internet more broadly would have been a wet dream for the Stasi, yet we somehow think that similar actors wouldn't use them in the present date.

>>29107

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

>>29106
I'm sure everything in the infographic will be true, but I bet it is designed to imply conclusions that go a lot further than the evidence does. On the one hand, the feds will definitely know all about 4chan and have people monitoring it for anyone dumb enough to plan unabummer activity there. But on the other hand, if they're actually controlling it, why was it so poorly managed and why is it still offline now?

Using my own rudimentary website identification expertise, 4chan.org is registered through Cloudflare (which is probably also controlled by the G-men if you think anything is), everything goes through Cloudflare when you visit boards.4chan.org, and 4chan Community Support LLC is the company behind 4chan.

4chan Community Support LLC has three employees, and the company is listed as "Acquired/Merged" but I'm not sure what that means: https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/82093-51#overview

It is owned by 2channel and the only name here is Hiroyuki Nishimura, the new moot (https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/4chan), but 4chan's trademark is owned by someone called James MacFarlane (https://trademarks.justia.com/858/67/4chan-85867485.html).

Wired looked into 4chan's ownership in more detail and mentions all sorts of companies you could look up yourself if you want, but none of them appear related to US intelligence services: https://www.wired.com/story/who-owns-4chan/

There's always the angle of, "Maybe they're there but they're just hiding even harder so nobody can find them!", but you could always make that argument about anything. Personally, I don't think 4chan is owned by US government enforcers, and I consider that assumption to be proven here, although I'm sure they work quite closely with them when needed.

>>29109

While I'm happily in the "Why would they need to actually own it when that wouldn't help them control the dialogue or monitor any better than they already can?" camp, if they did own it they'd be pretty useless secret services if you could just ID them from publicly available listings such as those you're citing.

>>29109
> is registered through Cloudflare (which is probably also controlled by the G-men if you think anything is), everything goes through Cloudflare[...]

Everything of significant size does, in some way, unless the source is rich enough to build their own CDN and the number of companies that can do that can be counted on your fingers. Running and maintaining a global infra like that is not impossible, but unless your needs are suitably different doing so is prohibitively expensive compared to buying of-the-shelf as it were.

The internet has decentralised ambitions, but the web on top of it is very centralised for the vast majority of Stuff people consume.

If it doesn't come back online, then instead of the /vr/ Doom/retro shooter threads, which were actually a huge hive of activity for the renaissance of "boomer shooter" modding and mapping these days, I will have to start posting on Doomworld or even start using Discord instead. Which I fucking hate the idea of.

I'll also miss the easily accessible repository of Warhammer rules and supplements on /tg/.

The thing about 4chan is that even though we all hate it and we all grew out of it and we all think it definitively jumped the shark somewhere between 2012 and 2016, it was a vital part of the internet ecosystem. It was a place where all kinds of little micro-cultures fermented and fertilised to soil that grew the foliage that the rest of the internet feeds on. Even if I hadn't spent a good chunk of my formative years on and off it, I would still hold it in a slightly nostalgic, idealised lens because it was the last remnant of the old internet.

Not just an internet where you could freely use racial epithets without the police knocking your door down and sending you to super jail, but an internet where nobody gave a fuck about "real world" rules, where information and expression was valued above all. There's an argument to be made that 4chan's anonymity was the closest thing humanity has ever created to a true egalitarianism.

It's true 90% of the place sucked nowadays, but it's just not the same anywhere else.

>>29112
I haven't been an active poster for almost a decade, but I still take part in one general thread's Secret Santa.
I'll genuinely be sad if it doesn't return.

>>29112
I post on 4chan every day; I check here first and then go there. I'm aware that I could do something more productive, but there's very little out there that I love more than the Snooker World Championships threads.

Today is the first day of this year's world championship. My withdrawal is about to get a lot more severe.

>>29114
I'm curious how splitters like yourself feel about the 4chan refugees who come here and try to post as they would over there.

>>29115
The most important thing for posts anywhere is effort, and the second-most important thing is originality. Many posts here would fit in just fine on certain parts of 4chan, and vice versa. The UK trains general on /n/ could easily move here and I doubt anyone here would complain. I am also confident that when I posted about this place once in /147/ (the snooker threads I was talking about), at least one of them came here permanently.

I've seen some shitty posts here lately, and they stand out a lot more because there aren't 20 other posts to read immediately afterwards until you've forgotten you saw them. But I get the impression most posters, even the bellends, could fit in here just fine if they just remembered the golden rule to lurk moar.

>>29115

I don't mind them coming here, but they can't bring their fucking "bokkle of lager for me so it is, womfy lads" bollocks with them. They have to assimilate into the local culture.

Like we used to say back in the day, Lurk Moar, innit.

I definitely think we need to bring back the intensity we had for handing out bans for spelling and grammar.

>>29117
If we allow that it won't be long until it's 'hecking puppers' and all that twee bollocks

>>29119

I don't think anyone does that any more. I think it was a rudgwicksteamshow.co.ukor or even just Facebook normie thing.

>>29120
It was used ironically on 4chan long after anyone had stopped using it seriously anywhere. A bit like “le”. I remember seeing a post there a few years ago that people had been writing “le me with le friends” for only a year or two, and the meme was now older than its users were at the time, and yet it was still alive and well on 4chan but nowhere else.

That being said, I have seen a couple of posts on Facebook from We Rate Dogs (the original home of hecking puppers as far as I’m aware) in the past month, after close to a decade of silence.

>>29117

Is this >>29119 what you meant? I assumed you were complaining about Deano /brit/posting. That's my least favourite thing I ever see on 4chan.

"oi oi lads going to the shop lads x"
"Anyone want anything from Tesco Express?"
"yeah lad 8 carlings and a daily express good lad x"
"need a few tinnies since I found out me bird voted remain x"

The idea that there are friendless autistic shut-ins whose greatest dream is to pretend to be a vacuous #lad sickens me more than anything for some reason. I am inexplicably sensitive to it. I quite explicitly wish agonising suffering upon anyone who types like that.

>>29119
I don't mind more aging millennials. And lord knows we need some women here or one slightly tomboyish woman who will work her way around two of us so we end up never posting here again.

In my mind the need to post with proper capitalisation will do them in.

Anyone else feel like the days are a lot longer now?

>>29123
By 'them' I of course mean the bad 4chan posters rather than women. Not that we've really attracted anyone.

>>29122
I'm all for keeping /brit/ posters off here though. Fuck me that is the most cancerous shit that seems to happen on every imageboard and it's always full of the very worst people.

>>29122

I love to troll those threads by just saying actual things that I have done in my life. They get very wound up and agitated and accuse you of lying and being a schizo larper. I pity those poor bastards for literally being the type of neckbeard who has never done anything in their life but post on 4chan. I don't profess to be some great socialite and top shagger, but my god.

But yeah I think we are on about the same thing. I noticed they have this weird infantile way of referring to stuff. They put "w" instead of the first letter of things, e.g "wuppa" instead of "cuppa", no idea what that one's about.

Overall I think I have to blame it on generational divide. We're all at least middling to older millennials here. To put it in terms of my foolproof generation yardstick, I don't think there's any .gs user who's first Pokemon was any later than Silver/Gold. But them lot in those threads, they grew up in the years after 4chan had already turned to shit, and they don't know any better. They are so irony poisoned they can't take anything seriously. I don't think they are capable of the good, proper, enlightened kind of cunt off we have here.

>>29123
>And lord knows we need some women here

That depends. There was a period 10+ years ago where we had at least a couple of women posting here and they shoehorned this in all the time. They couldn't decide whether they wanted to be called lassmates or ladylads, but it was tedious. Be careful what you wish for.

>>29124
>Anyone else feel like the days are a lot longer now?
That's a good thing, really. It's the same feeling as when you stop wanking. Although I am ripping through my actual hobbies; I've got DVD box sets and books and I might run out of both soon. I don't really know how else to entertain myself, but hopefully that skill will return.

>>29126
>ladylad
Still glad that one got nipped in the bud

>>29126
>>29128
My vote is for ladybird. I don't remember this - we just had an escort offering a discount.

>>29127
What hobby are we taking up then? I started reading that Passport to Magonia but turning into an aging paranormal guy feels too cliché.

>It's the same feeling as when you stop wanking

Let's not get silly now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1kJhSMuV60

>>29092
We all do, Bernd.

(A good day to you Sir!)

They’re working on bringing it back! The second coming is, erm, coming.

In 2019 someone on 4chan started having a go at me for being a eskimo because I used the word "nadir". This was while I was trying to explain to someone else that the "means of production" existed before Marx wrote about them, and he merely described them, he didn't invent them. This was a significant moment in why I stopped using the site, because far too many conversations were like dealing with a hybrid white-skinhead-cum-primary-school-child entity. I hope the end of that sentence doesn't flag this site on a paedofinder general office at the NCA.

>>29132
Now the imageboard with no admin will also have no mods. Exciting! Maybe I'll start eating my own shite too!

>>29133
I'm sorry that someone hurt your feelings on the internet.

>>29134
On the contrary, my feelings weren't hurt the least. The problem was realising "I'm too good for this place", which might sound arrogant, but I don't think the situation I described is one where I'm the problem, and I stopped wanting to spend my free time trying, and presumably failing, to uplift virulent anti-semites and gormless memeophiles out of the muck.

I used to post in the Football Manager thread on /sp/, that was alright. Then I stopped playing Football Manager.

>>29133

It sounds like you were using/pol/. It's a bit like going to Asda and complaining that it's not for you when you only browsed the frozen chips section.

Admittedly /pol/ism had leaked out into a lot of the rest of the site as of late but overall I maintain it was more worth using than not. 4chan always reminded me of a big open air market where you'll hear blokes shouting about bollocks and there's a load of shite on sale but it's also the only place you find the really good stuff when you know where to look.

>>29136
Nope, not /pol/.

>/pol/ism had leaked out into a lot of the rest of the site as of late
m8, I just told you I've barely used the site in five or six years. Unless "of late" is what you call ten years ago, the website's been unpleasant shite for more or less as long as it was a good old laugh. You're not going to convince me it's not a website swollen with dickheads of a willfully limited intelligence because I've seen it become so with my own eyes, I'm not Angela Eagle.

The difference between 4chan and your fictional market is that at the market you don't have to stick your hand down a filthy u-bend to find some fresh raspberries. Also, have you got enough food in, you're making a lot of shopping analogies?

>>29137

Listen I'm approaching middle age and "as of late" means any time in the last decade. Like when I say "the other day" and really mean six months ago.

4chan is back online.

>>29139
The urge to be present for its triumphant return is too great. But I would have liked it to stay offline a bit longer. Even though I was using other imageboards and had not cured my addiction at all, I am now afraid of falling back into my old habits.

>>29135
I think one of the great things about 4chan is that because you can go there and say things you don't mean, you can also assume that anyone who is disagreeing with you is doing that too. There's no way of knowing, after all. If I had the experience you'd had, and I have had similar experiences multiple times, I would simply roll my eyes that people were replaying such a hackneyed and threadbare prank, rather than believing I had somehow stumbled across someone who spends enough time online to visit smaller 4chan threads but is still so thick as to genuinely hold all the opinions you mentioned.

>>29139
Yeah, but is it any good? Maybe niche corners of blue boards but none of those interest me. What could I possibly go there for? The YLYL channels suck and every thread is rage baiting political agendas or porn. There's so much porn in /b/ now it's disgusting.

It's interesting to see the early hours of 4chan being back because most of the active scam operations, shilling and random discord cults have yet to properly start spamming the catalogues. /gif/ is starting to but the last time I looked there's no BNWO stuff.

>>29142
>BNWO
Black…New World Order?

>>29143

I envy your ignorance.

>>29143

Imagine anxieties about the "great replacement" transmuted into hardcore pornography.

Yes, it is exactly as bad as it sounds.

>>29144
>>29145
I looked it up, and apparently the W doesn't stand for "White" like it usually does in B_W_ acronyms on /gif/. I rarely went on /gif/ but when I did, I have a very specific fetish that enabled me to completely avoid the racial stuff.

I suspect his "very specific fetish" is tricking people into asking about his fetishes, so I'm not going to do so.

https://blog.4chan.org/post/781845918774394880/still-standing

>On the afternoon of April 14th, a hacker using a UK IP address exploited an out-of-date software package on one of 4chan’s servers, via a bogus PDF upload.
Whoever it was, they could also have posted here if they wanted to.

>One slow but much beloved board, /f/ - Flash, will not be returning however, as there is no realistic way to prevent similar exploits using .swf files.
F

>We are bringing on additional volunteer developers to help keep up with the workload, and our team of volunteer janitors & moderators remains united despite the grievous violations some have suffered to their personal privacy.
I haven't seen them asking for people, so I don't know where these volunteer developers are coming from.
>4chan is back. No other website can replace it, or this community. No matter how hard it is, we are not giving up.
That sounds much more pessimistic than I was expecting.

>>29112
>closest thing humanity has ever created to a true egalitarianism.

Try explaining that to a non-imageboard-user. You'll get told that you're hateful or some such nonsense.

Yes, well, perhaps that's why the revolutionaries also included liberty and fraternity alongside equality, lest we reduce everyone to piss-rats and call it a day.