“Every time I say 8kun the stupider it sounds.”
– Fredrick Brennan¹⁾

8chan was a bulletin board website which let people create and manage their own boards, and the website was founded by Fredrick “Copypaste” Brennan on October 22, 2013. It was given to NTTEC on May 12, 2016,²⁾³⁾ who would later rebrand it to 8kun on October 6, 2019.⁴⁾⁵⁾

In its prime, 8chan was an edgier 4chan and while GamerGate is no longer relevant, they have left a lasting impact with its idealization of free speech. Afterwards, the website entered a lull and lost relevance with violent radicalization being the last thing it was known for until it collapsed on itself. After the 8kun rebranding, it's mostly been home to old nationalistic geezers with everyone else fleeing to other refuge websites.

The story is that Brennan wrote “infinite chan” on a mushroom trip while browsing 4chan and was inspired by Foster's infamously poor management of 4chon. From there, he began to hack away at the Tinyboard fork, Vichan, with a “Reddit-style imageboard” in mind and developed “Infinity” within two days.⁶⁾ While it was called “infinitechan” (∞chan), everyone wound up calling it “8chan” instead.⁷⁾

“First, I'm not a gamer, the issues never really mattered to me. I took the opportunity to host GamerGate discussion on 8chan while I owned it but never really cared about game journalism.”
– Fredrick Brennan⁸⁾

The website began as an obscure refuge for niche, foreign communities⁹⁾ until September 16, 2014, when somebody set up the first GamerGate board.¹⁰⁾ This drew in tons of GamerGate refugees after 4chan banned it¹¹⁾ and those migrants greatly influence 8chan's general tone. Soon after, 8chan had partnered with 2channel under NTTEC,¹²⁾¹³⁾ but Brennan didn't know that they actually stole 2channel at the time.¹⁴⁾

In January 2015, 8chan was DDoS'd¹⁵⁾ and its “8chan.co” domain got suspended,¹⁶⁾ so they moved to their “8ch.net” domain.¹⁷⁾¹⁸⁾ On May 8, 2015, Joshua Moon, the owner of Kiwi Farms, started developing “Infinity Next” to replace their “Infinity” software.¹⁹⁾ Software migration began around September 2015, but failed a lot and caused a lot of downtime,²⁰⁾²¹⁾ so it eventually got canned on January 26, 2016.²²⁾

“Although I gave away 8chan voluntarily, it was never a fair fight. I was set up to fail.”
– Fredrick Brennan²³⁾

On May 12, 2016, Brennan hands 8chan over to NTTEC,^24)25)26) causing a short-term panic that faded as several uneventful months flew by. On April 1, 2017, a Tinyboard vulnerability was used to hack 8chan, forcing the emergency week-long shutdown.²⁷⁾ Some users eyed an IP logger²⁸⁾ that the prior administration left on, so it was disabled.²⁹⁾ As a result of the hack, “Infinity” was forked into “OpenIB”.³⁰⁾

QAnon was banned from 4chan around November 25, 2015, so their cult leader began using 8chan as the alternative³¹⁾³²⁾ and the cult gradually followed suit.³³⁾ After years of complaints, the board owner of /pol/ would finally be removed on May 27, 2018 and /pol/ was turned into a global board.³⁴⁾³⁵⁾ However, this action had dire consequences that nobody really expected.

On March 15, 2019, the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque shootings uploaded his manifesto onto 8chan's /pol/ board and linked a stream of his actions. He received praise for this and inspired radicalized copycats, as seen with the Poway synagogue shooting on April 27, 2019 and the El Paso shooting on August 3, 2019. After the third incident, Brennan would speak out about having 8chan shut down.³⁶⁾

Cloudflare insisted they had a “moral obligation” to keep 8chan in check under their network,³⁷⁾ but they later backtracked and booted them,³⁸⁾ so 8chan tried following The Daily Stormer to Epik's BitMitigate³⁹⁾ and 8chan went back up for a while before Voxility cut off Epik's web hosting service,⁴⁰⁾⁴¹⁾ which forced Epik to deny service to 8chan.⁴²⁾⁴³⁾ And so, 8chan went down indefinitely after August 5, 2019.⁴⁴⁾

On August 6, 2019, the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security issued a subpoena to Jim Watkins, asking him to address the proliferation of extremist content on 8chan.⁴⁵⁾ Meanwhile, another radicalized copycat shooter emerged with the Bærum mosque shooting on August 10, 2019 with Endchan being used as collateral, but they didn't actually achieve anything compared to the previous three shootings.⁴⁶⁾⁴⁷⁾

Jim received the subpoena and the hearing was scheduled on September 5, 2019 at 9:30am,⁴⁸⁾ with 8chan being kept offline until then.⁴⁹⁾ Time passes and the hearing concluded with Jim promising changes.⁵⁰⁾⁵¹⁾ However, the website remained offline past that.⁵²⁾⁵³⁾ On October 6, 2019, it was announced that 8chan will become 8kun⁵⁴⁾ at “8kun.net”,⁵⁵⁾ killing the “8chan” brand and distancing Brennan from it.

Shortly after, another copycat shooter emerged with the Halle synagogue shooting on October 9, 2019, using a /meadhall/ thread on Meguca,⁵⁶⁾⁵⁷⁾ but it didn't really achieve much like the previous one. After numerous setbacks, with services being warned of 8chan becoming 8kun in order to deplatform it, Jim would state that 8kun would try to come back online by November 5, 2019 after much, much delay.⁵⁸⁾

On November 2, 2019, 8chan relaunched as “8kun”⁵⁹⁾ and heavily marketed itself to the QAnon crowd,⁶⁰⁾ but its relaunch was rough as it faced stability issues,⁶¹⁾ temporary ISP deplatforming,⁶²⁾⁶³⁾ and domain registrar suspensions.⁶⁴⁾⁶⁵⁾ For some reason, their new domains were only announced via mailing list, burning through domains like “8kun.net”, “8kun.us”, “8kun.tw”, until ending up at “8kun.top”.

Most of the former userbase chose not return to the rebranded website. The boards that did return were /v/, owned by an NTTEC employee,^66)67)68) and the QAnon crowd in /qresearch/. However, the board owner of /v/, Mark Mann, wrote about his disillusionment and tried having an open discussion with the users,⁶⁹⁾ only to get fired and removed,⁷⁰⁾ but not without getting the userbase to move out of 8kun to an 8chan clone.

As the 2020 U.S. presidential election approaches, a simple phone call briefly takes 8kun offline again,⁷¹⁾ prompting Ron to bring up “Project Odin”⁷²⁾ which doesn't exist.⁷³⁾⁷⁴⁾ Then on November 3, 2020, which happens to be the day of the election, Ron announces that he would be stepping down from administrator.⁷⁵⁾ The move has been seen as an “out”⁷⁶⁾ if the QAnon movement turned violent.⁷⁷⁾⁷⁸⁾

Following the U.S. Capitol being stormed on January 6, 2021, which Ron Watkins encouraged,⁷⁹⁾⁸⁰⁾ there was a slew of deplatforming⁸¹⁾⁸²⁾ that caused 8kun to announce plans to migrate to the deep web.⁸³⁾ On January 20, 2021, the day of Biden's inauguration, one disgruntled global moderator purged /qresearch/, retaliating for the website's decline and the incompetence of both Jim and Ron Watkins.⁸⁴⁾

• Don't make a board here. The process is not automated, slow, and there are better alternatives.
  • Unfortunately, I refuse to promote any refuge, alliance, federation, or webring with ties to 8chan.
• You can easily debunk 8chan's most prominent, self-proclaimed innovations:
  • It wasn't the first English website to let people to make their own boards, that goes to AnonIB.
  • It wasn't the first English website to use “-kun” as a suffix, that goes to Lolikun.
• Back in 2014, during the GamerGate drama, people legitimately planted child pornography to bring 8chan down or further tarnish its reputation. This is common with AnonIB-like websites.
• It was always funny to see 8chan boards migrate to other user-created boards or other websites.
• When 8chan resurfaced at “8kun.net”, a traceroute allegedly showed an IP address associated with the DoD and this was used to imply that 8kun is a honeypot. It has been debunked.^85)86)87)

• Leftypol

• 8chan.co / 8ch.net - The original 8chan domains, no longer in service for obvious reasons.
  • @infinitechan on Twitter - Used to post announcements and propaganda. Effectively defunct.
• 8kun.net / 8kun.us / 8kun.tw / 8kun.top - The current domains for 8kun.
  • @jimwatkins on Gab - 8kun's distant owner. Still peddling American nationalist propaganda.
  • @codemonkeyz on Telegram - 8kun's former administrator. Still peddling conspiracies.
• @fr_brennan on Twitter - 8chan's founder who distanced himself from 8chan. Somewhat liberal.