[josinalvo]

When people build their own platforms, the censorship minded mobs go after their upstream providers, like aws and visa. So this "you can always build your own" is not 100% true.

Also, mobs do go after you for your online speech, so the possibility of a platform that keeps your speech up does not preclude the possibility (and fact) of censorship

[mirimir]

True enough. However, I don't believe that anyone has taken down a Tor onion service, except by first identifying the server in meatspace. And that's typically depended on OPSEC failures.

It's true that CMU researchers deanonymized onion services and their users by exploiting the relay early bug, and then produced data to the FBI. However, site owners and users would have been safe if they had protected themselves better. By reaching Tor through nested VPN chains, and by using firewall rules or Whonix to prevent leaks around Tor.