Blog survival

As the poison of cancel culture metastasizes across the internet, those of us who feel potentially in the crosshairs must look to our defenses.  The recent termination of Exulansic's YouTube channel and deletion of Yellowdog Granny's blog were warnings, as was the take-down of Vox Popoli blog (the latter's content is about as repulsive and despicable in my eyes as it's possible for a blog to be, but it's the principle of the thing).  Thugs determined to silence anyone who expresses views they disapprove of are on the march, and as a target myself of a two-year campaign of hateful, harassing, and often perverted trolling, I definitely have grounds for concern that it could happen to me.

The good news is that in all three cases, the cancelers were defeated.  Exulansic already had all her videos backed up on a censorship-free platform, and she continues her prolific posting there (some other YouTubers are taking the same precaution).  Yellowdog Granny was restored with a new URL, though it took time.  Vox Popoli, having long anticipated deletion, had a back-up blog ready to go, and continued without interruption.

I'd advise any blogger who posts controversial material, or anything that some set of prigs or other might decide to be "offended" by, to give some thought to how they would get back online if this happened to them.  Preparation clearly helps toward quick recovery if a blogger gets canceled.  As I've mentioned before, I have been doing research on-and-off trying to find a blogging platform that would suit my needs and be guaranteed censorship-free if I needed to create a new blog.  I've also been making frequent back-ups of my blog's entire content.

In addition to that, I've started making screencaps of the posts I'd be most interested in preserving if this blog got deleted and I needed to set up a new one.  Re-posting them in image form wouldn't be an ideal solution (hyperlinks would be lost, for example), but it is, at least, pretty much guaranteed to work.  The back-up process creates a 70-megabyte block of HTML, and I have no idea whether it would be easy or even possible to reconstruct the blog from that on a new platform; but any platform enables a blogger to post images.  In the case of a few link-heavy posts, I've made copies of the HTML; reconstructing a single post from that would be a chore but certainly doable.

I've also been strategic by prioritizing back-ups of the posts which the trolls would be most likely to object to.  The aim here is to deter any effort to get me canceled since the very posts they most want to get rid of would immediately be restored as soon as I got a new blog up (and I'd still be linking to other material opposing their cause in the Sunday link round-ups, which would continue on the new blog).  Indeed, it's their own persistence in harassing me over the last two years that first motivated me to focus so much on opposing their cause (though since then I've come to deeply admire the brave and inspirational people who are taking a stand against that nonsense), and if they actually got my blog taken down and put me through the hassle of setting up a new one, obviously I'd become even more determined to contribute all I could to the fight against them.

I still think that my blog disappearing is fairly unlikely.  The Blogger platform seems to be open to a very wide range of viewpoints, and I've never had any indication from them that they had a problem with anything I wrote or linked to.  But in the current menacing situation, with others having fallen prey to cancellation, I'd be foolish not to be preparing for the possibility.  And if you are a blogger, and if you post viewpoints (left, right, or whatever) that some shitty fascist-minded prig might believe shouldn't be allowed, you'd be well advised to do the same.  I'd be interested to know what precautions others are taking, in case there's anything I've missed that I could be doing.