This episode about the takedown and reinstatement of the video-downloading tool youtube-dl (Part 1, Part 2) makes three things clear.
One, centralised platforms like Github are single points of failure. This is especially unfortunate on the Internet, which is decentralised from the ground-up. Maintainers of projects like youtube-dl must invest in building a censorship-resistant presence online.
Two, despite decentralization, we need organizations like the EFF, the Mozilla Foundation, the Tor Project, the Wikipedia Foundation, the Internet Archive. To that end, we must support them monetarily and, if possible, by volunteering. We must also hold them to extremely high standards of ethics and neutrality and keep them from being beholden to, or even the appearance of being beholden to, a government or a particular tech company. If they make bad strategic decisions, we must criticise – constructively. They may not be big, but they are too important to fail.
Three, we must recognise that every one of us needs to be an activist for an open Internet. Our actions and inaction have consequences. If no one had expressed their opinion on this issue online – even merely through blog/Medium posts or tweets – it’d be harder for the EFF’s efforts to have the impact that they did. Think back to other instances where Internet companies have been pressured into reversing decisions due to public opinion: the tussle between Apple and the email app Hey being the most recent one. Hey’s founders have a great many followers they could rally, but it was those followers that made the difference. The greater your online audience your capital, the greater your responsibility to be a good citizen of the Internet.