John Vibes | Truth Theory
The censorship-free alternative media platform Minds went down temporarily on Thursday, but came back online shortly after. When the site came back online, representatives of Minds say that the outage was a result of over 200,000+ new people signing up for the site one the same day. A large number of sign-ups were from Thailand, where increased internet censorship has forced users from mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
“Yesterday we saw 200,000+ new users. We are thrilled to provide privacy, internet freedom and digital rights for Thai netizens. This is exactly the reason Minds exists,” Minds CEO Bill Ottman said in a statement.
Some of the most notable social media users to recently migrate to Minds includes Wiroj Lakkana-adisorn, an MP for the disbanded Future Forward Party; social critic Sarinee Achavanuntakul, writer-translator Tomorn Sookprecha, satirical TV host Winyu “John” Wongsurawat, and academic Pavin Chachavalpongpun.
“We are immediately building out our translation and localization framework for Thai and many other languages. This should be finished within a few weeks. All of our project is fully open source at https://developers.minds.com and people can submit requests at https://gitlab.com/minds. They can also inspect our software to make sure we aren’t manipulating algorithms or user privacy. We already have Thai developers helping with the code and building new tools,” Ottman said.