It's vigilantism in the sense that people are trying to take down their service on every possible layer (in this case: peering/infrastructure) but no one is willing to make a legal case against them.
But how is this vigilantism, which implies taking the law into one’s own hands?
There doesn’t need to be a legal case to refuse service to someone using your services for harassment.
If a group of people make a hobby out of walking into gay bars and verbally abusing customers, it’s not vigilantism to refuse service to those groups / kick them out.
One can be banned from an establishment for far less.
The thing is that at a certain level, things just become essential infrastructure to function.
Moon has its own server, its own network (AS), a colocation that is willing to host his server as long as he does not violate US law or ignores incoming complaints.
But now it's the peering companies just refusing to route to them, based on some complaints that might not even be fact checked. For many that could be considered essential infrastructure, since you cannot simply start your own peering company.
For reference, his .is domain was taken down since people complained about CSAM hosted on his site. But in fact the links provided were not CSAM. But who is willing to check with that and potentially having to deal with law enforcement as a consequence for this? Likely no one, thus they drop him to stay on the safe and easy side then to protect a costumer that's could be trouble, even if some accusations are wrong.
It's a bit similar as with roads or with the post. Many people dislike Joe Rogan I guess. But imagine now disallowing him to drive on certain roads, UPS/DHL refusing to send packages to his address, AT&T disconnecting his lines because they disagree with him.
Surely at some point you cannot just build everything on your own.
And that's all for services that are (still) considered to be legal, but for which companies just are not willing to take up the heat.
Kiwifarms users are engaging in vigilantism against their targets, and it's not even vigilantism for a real crime - it's vigilantism for the "crime" of being transgender.
I believe the parent comment was implying vigilantism on the part of ISPs/providers for the actions they’ve taken against KF.
I agree that the participants there are engaging in something closer to vigilantism, although I don’t think they actually believe they have a righteous cause, they’re just unabashedly intolerant and enjoy harassing people which is something else.
This isn't quite accurate. While they do disproportionately make threads about people who are trans, they have plenty of threads about cis people as well. It's not like they target random transgender people. If anything, the "crime" would be being Internet-famous.
