In a long enough timeline, every artist will be forced to take Crypto

The biggest tragedy of the art spheres online moving to Twitter and buying into fear porn endlessly about crypto, then NFTs, then AI, is very obvious. Artists are losing out on a lot of tools to literally survive in the modern economy. The truth is, being bombarded with propaganda 24/7 about how bad crypto is was probably the most self-destructive thing many artists could hear. Let’s talk about why, with a background on how this happened.

During the 2010s, there was a shift away from the “commission” and “YCH auction” style of making money to Patreon and similar sites. Patreon would become a way to monetize internet art and indie games, and especially drawn pornography. For many internet artists, this was a chance to quit their job and make a living off drawing whenever they felt like it. Patreon was controversial for many, as some used it as a paywall. This would hit a breaking point and back in the /furry/ days, the most infamous spammer Bui developed yiff.party. This made online artists angry, because they were paywalling their content. But this also would become a turning point online; the future in the mid-2010s was Patreon. It was a consistent source of money for many, and the e-celebs on the platform could make some serious money each month. Even better, as Patreon is a “lump sum” on your statement, many people tend to forget they’re giving money to some guy who might have taken a long internet hiatus or abandoned his social media accounts.

Well, it seemed to be that way. And then the crackdowns on Patreon, Gumroad, and other sites began where websites got increasingly puritan about what you could and couldn’t upload. This isn’t just one site, this is across the board, and for a very good reason. It boils down to payment processors.

Payment Processors: the root of all evil

Payment processors are very notorious for cracking down on anything they don’t like. Due to the events of the mid-2010s, the corporations decided to help the government snuff out many opposition individuals online and get politically active. Banks and payment processors however had an ace up their sleeve, they could shut down bank accounts and “debank” people, and payment processors could keep people from making money.

While pornography sites were very often caught in this sort of deal, including the high profile payment processor ban with PornHub (over some very real scandals about the site not doing proper vetting and having everything from “revenge”/non consensual porn to CSAM/CP uploaded), one of the first to be caught in this were what one would consider dissident sites. This led to a great ZeroHedge post about the matter, which called for neutral banking laws. Of course this didn’t go anywhere, but it’s worth reading. I’ll post the most damning quote here because it explains it better than I could:

Consider a company like Patreon. They are an online crowdfunding service which handles donations from many supporters to many online content creators. Patreon has its own rules, uses Stripe as a payment gateway and payment processor, agrees to Stripe’s terms of service, and then Stripe coordinates with all major payment networks which each have their own set of agreements. That means every creator on Patreon must obey six different sets of rules. If the gateway were its own company, it would be seven. It is no wonder so many people get banned, as only the most tepid and inoffensive content creators could hope to meet so many different standards!

Patreon must keep Stripe happy to stay in business, and Stripe must keep all four payment networks happy to stay in business. If any one of MasterCard, Visa, Amex, or Discover pass a rule, then it affects the entire downstream ecosystem. If Discover (5% of the market) says an industry or behavior is prohibited, then Stripe must enforce that rule on all the merchants on their service (even merchants who do not process Discover). If Discover were to cut ties with Stripe, then Stripe would lose at least 5% of their transactions over night and any merchants who do want to process Discover cards. That is a large and dramatic blow to any company operating on small margins.

So if you want to upload to a site like Patreon, you have to obey 6 different sets of rules, period. This isn’t just a Patreon issue however. The CEO of Automattic, who bought Tumblr and owns this website, made a similar post as well. In it, he also blames the same people as well for this:

Credit card companies are anti-porn. You’ve probably heard how Pornhub can’t accept credit cards anymore. Or seen the new rules from Mastercard. Whatever crypto-utopia might come in the coming decades, today if you are blocked from banks, credit card processing, and financial services, you’re blocked from the modern economy. The vast majority of Automattic’s revenue comes from people buying our services and auto-renewing on credit cards, including the ads-free browsing upgrade that Tumblr recently launched. If we lost the ability to process credit cards, it wouldn’t just threaten Tumblr, but also the 2,000+ people in 97 countries that work at Automattic across all our products.

Essentially, allowing porn would not only hurt the Tumblr business but the core business (WordPress) as well. Payment processors hate porn like they hate anything too politically loaded. This is why Tumblr will never host porn again unless it’s spun off or sold off to new owners who realized what made Tumblr good (and even then, will it even be as good if the users are gone? Maybe some will come back.) Of course, there’s a workaround for this, and its one artists online won’t like to hear.

Crypto and bypassing banks

Just like how the situation with banks has changed, so has the situation with taking payment. Pornhub has not been completely debanked, but they cannot take credit cards. Instead, if you want to sign up for Pornhub Premium, you have to submit payment with ACH, e-wallet….and Crypto:

Another example of a website on the “lists of sites payment processors might not like” is the conspiracy-boomer-right website Infowars. While you can still give Alex Jones cash donations via the store or buy the products he promotes on his store, you can also donate crypto to him now as well. This is done for another obvious reason, he knows whales and supporters of his show might be sketchy about sending him money through a credit card, and might have tons of crypto holdings. So he accepts them as well.

You might be asking yourself why Pornhub and Infowars have no aversion to this when internet artists panic and turn it into a culture war issue against people they hate online, and it’s obvious. Crypto is one way to send money when you lose your banking access. Online dissident groups have learned this the hard way, many of them solely or also take Bitcoin or other cryptos and some of the most paranoid and more watched ones only accept XMR. Why XMR? Well, XMR (Monero) is private meaning that you don’t have to deal with a French programmer suicide situation where anyone can track where the money went. A website gloated at how they were able to easily track the identity and who got money from a suicidal programmer who got in early, likely due to sloppy opsec before his suicide. As a result, at least one person he donated to ended up taking XMR only, and Nick Fuentes claimed he was banned from banks from this (this would turn out to be a lie for clout when his online reputation imploded).

But the thing is, the far-right groups and people who were branded as such because of their viewerbase and who they orbited online (Luke Smith comes to mind) were able to get this because they already planned ahead, or saw where the wind was blowing. Some of them already lost their bank accounts, and others knew that there were many whales using cryptocurrency. After all, they were one of the first groups that Patreon and the like targeted. Nowadays literally everyone in that paranoid crowd loves to use cryptocurrency for this very reason. Even in Canada, many anti-vaccine protesters during the “freedom convoy” lost their bank accounts as supporters got doxed and fired, and many who had learned beforehand lamented the fact they didn’t use this.

And just like that, payment processors then came for the internet porn artists. If you think that any tactics used against unlikable people who take money to complain online about women and avoid working are just going to be used against them, you really haven’t seen where the internet is heading.

The Russian issue

It’s a shame that online, many artists were high on their own supply about how crypto is killing the planet or something. They didn’t take crypto because they heard it was bad from their friends, and in those circles the worst crime one can have (even more than being a sex pest) is to have the wrong takes on current issues online. So as a result, many of them are psyopped against it. Why could this be a problem? Look at Russia.

The Russian economy isn’t that great. It never was before the war either. It was like a lot of third world countries, it has a weak currency and it took a hit after two major events: COVID and the war. Before the war, there were even some companies like Sabre Interactive outsourcing development work there for less money, and Postal III was made by a Russian company as RWS thought they could make a great game for less money (it was a disaster). But also, the commission economy and Patreon were boons for artists living in poor countries like Russia, Southeast Asian, and South American countries. They’re notorious for wages where the minimum is a few dollars a day, so being able to make mad money from furries with big tech incomes or credit card maxing was a dream come true. To quote one person who wanted to make money this way in Mexico, he could live like a king on US dollars.

And then the war happened.

See, Russia escalated a war between separatists and Ukraine that’s been going on since the mid 2010s, which most people had no idea about until it would boil over once in a while such as during the infamous MH17 shootdown. While the TV was talking about the war in Syria and the middle east with the rise of ISIS, there was another one breaking out within Ukrainian border towns, and the most people saw about it was that “Russia funded guys shot a plane down”. For a while this would be a huge international scandal all over 24 hour news networks, given the severity of it and who was responsible. But aside from that, the Ukrainian war got little coverage (I only learned about many bits and pieces of it after 2022, it was that blackholed). Something like NPR was talking about a buk missile for a while and who used it, before going back to your routine coverage of ISIS and the Koch Brothers. That is, until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 with the “special military operation”.

Naturally the USA and ally response was to sanction Russia. The idea was a presumably a matter of 5d chess, to hurt the average Russian citizen so they are pushed against the war being denied access to McDonald’s and iPhones and other icons of western capitalism that were common in Russia. Some websites and programs thought that to punish Russia, it was mandatory to hurt the average Russian citizen by blocking access to RU citizens or coding in booby traps like the infamous file wiper that was on the news (nevermind the fact many are apathetic to Putin with some even disliking the war but not saying it). The idea of sanctions working or not is a mixed bag, the USA and its allies have many citizens angry about gas prices (and in Europe, natural gas prices), and Germany even had to restart coal plants.

Meanwhile Russian versions of fast food chains usually dropped the branding and switched suppliers while serving the same food. There’s also some video I saw showing that designer goods and Apple products are still being brought into the country despite sanctions and all (they cost more though due to this). There’s also been intense web filtering going on in Russia as well, and many people I know there are using VPNs or Tor to access English websites. Not even to see what’s going on with the war like the creators might think, but because they want their Twitter. I’ve even heard news reports of companies sanction dodging. Of course, prices for many things went up as a result of this as well from what I heard, but it’s not as bad as it is in the USA.

One of the first groups of people being punished for the crime of being Russian were internet artists using PayPal. As a result of the war, many artists deleted Russia from the bio. There was outrage from artists in Russia over losing access to payment processors over this as well as they really just wanted to survive in an economy where all the jobs pay poorly. That’s on top of the looming fear of being drafted into a war they really don’t want to fight or a military they don’t care about (which is a common issue for artists living in countries like this, I knew one who had a mental breakdown over being drafted in South Korea).

So there was a time when artists moved from payment processor to payment processor, hoping to get somewhere. Eventually I’m sure they found some, but being that Russia is being sanctioned based on a war, there’s a chance they could get dropped again. Some did float crypto, but some furry swopped in to say why it’s bad and many just went with the most convenient option. Given you can’t call Bitcoin for a chargeback, I’m sure many commissioners are sketchy about it too.

But what if the situation there gets worse? What if the no-name payment processor is forced to stop doing business in Russia due to a hit piece or something? The Russian artists will be forced into crypto, which is where the reality hits.

Artists will be forced into using crypto in the end

A common critique about crypto is that it’s a “solution in need of a problem”, and this is doubled up with it being hard to make crypto payments IRL, or withdraw it in many cases, or exchanges acting as central banks and freezing wallets (and forcing users to withdraw in dollars instead). I’m sure much of this was due to “that one coworker” who was desperate to get rich quick by throwing money on a “shitcoin” on Kraken/Coinbase/similar to get rich quick. No really, the people gambling on Robin Hood to get rich from meme stocks pivoted to gambling on cryptocurrency to get rich (and increasingly dodgy crypto casinos like Stake). I knew coworkers who were spending time on the clock starting at the graphs. But the hard reality is situations like this are the problems crypto is ending up solving, especially with Monero.

Monero is especially nice for this very reason, due to its privacy focus. Monero is designed to be a private coin without a visible blockchain, free from the prying eyes of individuals with seemingly infinite resources at their whim. While many exchanges don’t sell it, Changenow.io does and allows you to exchange BTC for XMR. You then send it to your wallet (using something like exodus.io, and you have to send it to the wallet otherwise it defeats the point of using a privacy coin and you can get banned for this even) and boom. You’ll have cryptocurrency to spend anonymously.

Anyhow; you have to obtain crypto and then you can spend it. But once you’re there, you’re also free of payment processors telling you what you can and cannot draw. The truth is, the situation will worsen. Different people have different groups to blame for this, from MasterCard to foreign investors. But playing the blame game and whack a mole with payment processors isn’t going to fix anything. You’ll be forever kicking the can down the road until you’re forced onto it, regardless of what that Twitter post you retweeted in 2021 about crypto killing the globe and being used to fund Nazis said.

My advice if you’re doing art online, especially of a NSFW variety, is to read into how crypto works. Don’t read fearmongering posts on your TL, read into how it actually works and ask yourself this. Your friends are being censored left and right, so why stay on something that is bound to rules when you can use crypto? As neopuritanism online increases from both sides, this will have to be done.

Some internet artists on the Fediverse already accept crypto, but these are an outlier and (usually also draw sketchier material). This isn’t a shock either. See; these internet artists are either on the fedi as they got pushed off mainstream sites for drawing said material, or they were tech savvy enough to know about crypto. After all, that’s why they’re on the social network where everyone tells you to use Linux as a custom if they’re not pushed off Twitter.

This is the future, and it’s going to be there if you like it or not. The artists drawing legally questionable art already had to, and soon the goalposts will be moved to the point the average furry porn artist has to when he wants to draw hypno art (which Patreon banned). Crypto will still be there when you have to use it. After all, PayPal infamously bans porn and many furry artists complain when theirs is banned. Which means in the end, the plan B will come sooner than later. In 2018, it might have been fringe political posters online having to take it. In 2024, it’s going to be porn artists.

Chasing the dragon of the past

The lifecycle of many people I have known on the internet goes something like this. A few years ago the internet was better, and for them it’s when like that guy in high school who never grew up they “peaked”. Everyone was going to be so great, even with the bad stuff happening the future seemed so much better still. Even when I was bombarded with bad things happening like some shooting or viral video that makes you angry, the main blackpill of the time was just college being a dead end and unable to find employment. But I had friends online, and things were looking so bright. Unfortunately for me and my friends, that’s when it seemed like everything peaked.

Just like that kid who is unemployed, has no girlfriend or the lowest quality ones, and lives with parents/a life funded by his parents (if he’s not working a bottom rung “unskilled” job like a McJob, Wal-Mart retail job, or warehouse wagie), internet addicts peaked a few years back. Then they fell victim to the drug use, the internet drama machine, and the general decay of internet culture. If you showed someone from 2015 this headline, they’d think it’s making fun of Tumblr users and if you showed someone in 2010 it, you’d think it’s a rejected comedy movie plot:

Of course, it’s obvious how we got to this phase to anyone paying attention. While Tumblr was a haven for artists and creatives (while canceling people and callout culture were big deals back then, the standards were laxer and you wouldn’t get some moral busybody yelling at you for drawing Pokemon porn), there was a blatant dark undercurrent of political drama that blew over into the mainstream when the users of that site moved to Twitter.com. You just had to be in on the current thing, you had to reblog it or you’re a bigot. Before George Floyd, it was Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, and more.

Nowadays internet scenes are in shambles. Many of the users checked out completely, went down the rabbit hole of drama, or became unrecognizable people. Checking on what your former friends years ago are up to now is the same morbid feeling of checking up on what the cool guy in high school is up to now. Maybe he married like the neighbor I had. Maybe he married a DeviantArtist wife and had a kid. Or maybe he went down the rabbit hole of drugs and insanity, e-begging online and wallowing away in his parents place or a run down shack he rooms with, unhappy and depressed. You want to see him succeed, but he feels so distant and like trying to talk some sense into him will end up with you blocked or worse. If the worst thing you can be accused of is racism in a college town with more BLM signs than black people, online the worst thing you can have are people chasing after everything you do trying to throw your dirty laundry (which everyone online has in a long enough timeline, let’s be honest) up to every TG group/Discord server mod you meet.

Internet scenes are dead from drama and antisocial behavior, and online communities are even worse. It’s frustrating trying to find new people to be friends with when everyone else can’t get close to you, or when talking to people seems hard because everyone you meet is oversocialized and overstimulated. It’s also frustrating watching someone you like or community you like go up in flames metaphorically.

This has led to some old internet movements like neocities sites, skinwalking the past with old school 90s website aesthetics and modern-day politics. There’s remasters and remakes of games, with OSRS and WoW Classic booming along with private servers for old games. There’s an obvious reason this fails of course. It’s that 2015, or 2010, or 2007, or 1998 aren’t coming back. Those days are over. The culture changed. But most importantly, the people changed.

The people made the community

The problem with all these attempts to bring back the old internet is simple. The technology and features of these old websites were only one part of the puzzle. The other of course, is the community it’s around.

Nearly every single remnant of the old internet community wise has been driven to forums like KF (and many adjacent sites ranging from rdrama.net to forums dedicated to specific communities) and of course The Fediverse. Imageboards are dead and overrun with spam, Twitter is overrun with spam and canceling, and sites like BlueSky and Cohost are ideological echo chambers where internet notoriety is met with a ban or place on blocklists. I’ve seen people banned from Bluesky or put on blocklists for being infamous enough elsewhere. The community doesn’t care, because this is what they want.

And so this leads to the issue with many of these communities. The people who liked the old internet community wise found themselves on the fediverse or forums, the latter of which consisted of one part of the old internet. These communities are gatekept in a different way, to keep undesirable individuals either out of the site or mocked relentlessly first (if they’re seen as not a threat to the site’s existence). A famous right wing fedi instance, Poa.st, will ban people for not liking anime. A weeb coomer instance like varishangout will delete your account if you don’t post your fetishes. Others will make you say racial slurs as an initiation ritual, simply because you are not allowed to say these words on the mainstream internet giving the words a mystical appeal similar to a killphrase.

Which leads us to sites like Neocities. Neocities is full of websites that feature users making links to their big tech social media sites that feel like business cards, along with modern day politics. I’d be delusional if I said these sites didn’t exist back in the day, as the existence of the old school “transsexual” community showed (see transsexual.org as an example for a real old-school web 1.0 site in this vein), but you had to go out of your way to find these. They read less like some old school website, and more like Tumblr politics. It doesn’t take long to go on neocities to find sites like this:

Or this:

You’ll find badly made (ironically) websites talking about the postmodern personal lives of individuals there. I really think you should click on random neocities sites. While not all of them are cringe and some are from FOSS nerds such as the legendary spyware.neocities.org, it’s a great glimpse into the postmodern internet with aesthetics of the old web.

There’s a point I want to make with this. It’s not that the people are so and so. It’s that the users there are the same as you’ll find on Twitter and formerly Tumblr. They’re not the same as the people of the past. In fact, even if you look at transsexual.org, you’ll notice that pronouns weren’t a thing back then, but rather “you are the wrong gender“. There’s a reason I point this out too, it’s to show that the aesthetics of these old sites also came with a different mindset. There are a lot of things on these sites that would be controversial to say today. Case in point, just look at how Newgrounds famously had a ton of games about shooting Muslims after 9/11 and mimicking South Park’s sense of humor. If you build the old internet in 2024, it’s not going to be the same as the old internet, because the people aren’t there. Or worse, you’re not allowed to be that anymore.

The moderation is different, too

Here’s another example of how the old web was defined by the people on it, but from a different POV. Let’s look at video games. I am sure that if you were to mimic DJ Keemstar on Halo 3 by playing Halo 2 on Insignia.live (which features pride flags on the Twitter + Discord logo as a protest about how “pride logos from corporations during a specific month don’t care about the LGBT”), I have a gut feeling you’ll get banned. It’s a good thing too many people don’t own communicators and 2.5 headsets that old phones used…yet. I mean his griefer group was called F@G.

Essentially, I haven’t tested this. But if I decided to mess with this on XEMU, a VPN, and a burner email, I’m sure I’d get banned. I just can feel it. I just know how it is from pattern recognition on old video games and the flags there. But don’t take my word for it. Look at modern gaming. Call of Duty has now added in AI voice chat monitoring even in private games with your bros after a long hard day of wage cucking it for $17 an hour. It’s also very sensitive.

This of course is an example of a different big tech problem which seeps its way into communities, which is top down moderation to influence behaviors. If they can’t make the community change, they will do it by force.

No website is a better example of this than 4chan, where the moderators refuse to deal with the spam issue. Spam is very prominent in threads, along with derailing, “sliding”, and the meme that /pol/ is literally dead from all the spam. Furthermore, moderators will send threads they hate to /pol/ (usually on topic but inevitably political threads on say /g/ as an example) or /trash/ (which has its own community of furries and whatnot, usually for NSFW threads or threads too “furry”), further trashing the discussions going on in the board. But one of the most infamous examples of 4chan moderators flexing their power has to be the now dead /qa/ board, which is almost completely locked and only 2-3 threads on it. This is because you see, members of that board infamously raided /lgbt/, which was a sacred cow to the site for obvious reasons.

After this, everyone there migrated off site to the sharty/Soyjak Party, which has been notorious for some wild raids and part of its lingo seeping into other parts of the internet. Yet it’s also been plagued with other issues such as users posting child abuse material in threads. That’s not a joke. Imageboards tend to be lightning rods for that sort of content, and that’s the other reason why nobody wants to dare touch hosting an “altboard” (any imageboard not 4chan in the anglosphere).

Why is 4chan dead culturally? It’s because of the people there in the top, who just let many people making the site bad keep posting. It’s all about the people.

This is just a look at the larger sites. Many Discord and Telegram communities are also flooded with overbearing moderators. Reddit is just as bad, with moderators having to stay within Reddit global rules to avoid a coup by the powermods or deletion. A controversial subreddit like /r/banpitbulls will have numerous warnings on the top which seem to change every few months reminding people of global Reddit rules. This is solely because they always have to keep bending over to the moderators at the top to keep hosting something that much of the site will dox users and pre-ban users for posting in.

 

The sanitized internet

Which leads us to the main problem again. The problem with all these sites wanting to mimic the old internet is they either die or become a monoculture, and that’s because of the people. The people are what make the internet go along. Cool people make the internet worth using, worth talking to friends on, and worth digging through the mountains of trash posted by spammers, low-quality users, ESLs, and nowadays ChatGPT/similar AI models.

The mainstream internet is sanitized harder than the security theater measures during COVID were. Thanks to moderation at the top, from AI chatbots to moderators who flex their power, every single part of the internet feels the same. People have different names, but they’re the same as people you’ve met and written off. The other problem is, the internet is now 100% divided. You either have to post in sanitized communities where you have to put on mental interview clothes to “fit in” and not risk getting banned, or you can post in few rules allowed communities that devolve into rage and arguing about how everything is going to ruin your life (with no solution).

Acting like a cargo cult about the old internet and thinking “if you build a website like the old websites, they will come” never works because the community already has a home, or they are run by the same exact people who ruined every other website. It won’t get better by doing this. What made the old internet what it was, was the people on it. The people on it prefer to use mainstream social media with a mask on, or post on the fedi/forums to try to network with like people.

The challenge here in the internet of 2024 is trying to make friends with similar interests, people who “know” the game and trying to connect to them when they’re not having the soul sucked out of them by the wage cage. When they’re not tired and sleepy after work and can’t focus on the chat. When they’re not ignoring you for their 400 other friends. To paraphrase someone who was oversocialized, he absolutely loved being able to log into the internet at any time and finding friends on at the same time they’re on, not caring about the quality of them, and hoping he’d find a diamond in the rough. He was later complaining to me about his ex, but failing to humor any of the interesting creative discussions we had when I first met him online. Crazy, isn’t it?

In the cancel happy sphere of mainstream social network and the private chat cliques of Discord/Telegram, it’s truly easier said than done. It’s great knowing that you’re one slip of the keyboard away from being ghosted and removed from a group when 2 days ago you shared similar interests and talked about characters you like. It’s great knowing that your oversocialized friend is likely to ditch the internet and see you as another username on a screen. You’re not his issue when he has tons of friends he can talk to, treating you like the 10^th side hoe he has this week to erp with.

To bring back the old internet, the mindset needs to change. If it doesn’t change, it will forever remain a skinsuit of ironic references to the past with modern day current year politics indistinguishable from any other person online (left or right wing). You just can’t get the old internet out of people who want to complain about someone else online, or their mom, or their life. Or maybe it was all an enigma and I was just projecting part of what I saw on the past through a rose-tinted lens of Flip Video compression, but I do remember the art sure was better then.

How I stopped worrying and learned to love the PC-98

In the mid-2010s during a computer buying binge, I remember seeing a laptop from one of the many JP sellers on eBay who flip stuff on us eBay for a profit, given there’s more money to be made there than on YAJ. I bid on some random PC-98 laptop, lost it, and then discovered the Discord community. I would order a Cs2, play with it for a while, get tired with how slow it was and the misinfo in the scene at the time (mostly from the former Discord owner who was very much crazy), and gave it to someone who probably didn’t use it much (because everyone was pushing the myth that you needed a 100v stepdown, inaccurate with the 98). The second one I got was a V16 Tower, but I sold that off because I bought the wrong FM sound card and couldn’t get YM2203 sound working on DOS.

Fast forward to late 2021. A lot of stuff happened with me personally, and online/IRL at the same time. When I mean a lot, I mean a lot. This isn’t a political post, but I’m sure anyone who was there in both times know just how hard the internet and culture changed in a few short years, outside of mass market Hollywood/modern AAA games/music where everything got slowly worse or stagnated. Of course, my friend circles weren’t immune to this and I think anyone who lived online in this time can attest to this. At this time, somehow a switch went off in my head and I decided I wanted another PC-98. I bought a PC-9821Cx3, a machine with an onboard YMF297 FM sound chip. As it turns out, this could run many DOS games and I was actually hooked on messing with the PC-98 again. A few other things happened in the PC-98 scene as well around this time, which I’ll talk about in another paragraph, but I was hooked on buying PC-98s. Flush seemingly with cash from a job I hated, I was spending money on old Japanese computers to distract myself from the disaster of my current (at the time job) which honestly sucked.

Essentially, I was working long depressing hours at a server factory diagnosing failed servers and seeing what was wrong with them. I was looking for something to enjoy, so I ended up throwing money down the hole of working on old PC-98 machines. I bought several different machines including a laptop, a barely documented high-res workstation, and even an Epson Clone of the PC-98. So I might as well talk about what got me into the PC-98 and to buy enough machines for me to enjoy.

It’s a PC, but not really.

The PC-9801/9821 is a very unique machine for one reason: it’s like a PC but it’s not. IBM clones are very popular computers to the point people have developed recreations of the motherboard in the ATX form factor. There’s YouTube channels and ecosystems dedicated to enhancing old computers and making them usable gaming machines. There are mountains of documentation in English, and outside Japan the PC cloners sold tons of machines.

Japan on the other hand was like Europe in a way: there were different proprietary computers competing with each other for market share. As the PC-98 was the business machine of choice, it sold millions in that realm and as a result had numerous games and software written for it. The PC-98 dramatically outsold and outlasted any other domestically produced Japanese computer, getting some upgrades in the form of more colors, faster CPUs, and even PCI towards the end.

It’s also incompatible with the PC. The PC-98 features a different BIOS, memory map, video/sound hardware, and more. The INTs in DOS are very different, along with the IRQ mappings of cards in the system. The expansion bus is this cool expansion bus called C-Bus, where cards slide in the back of the machine and are screwed down into the case. However, for a while PC-98s also didn’t have HDDs you could slap in, using hardcard style cages or external SCSI cards (think like on old Macs/the Amiga). As a result, the only PC programs that will work on a PC-98 are Windows programs., due to Windows using a HAL to abstract away the hardware.

It has tons of games (with a caveat)

A lot of old computers I had been getting into at the time lacked software and especially dumped software. UNIX workstations come to mind, many commercial programs are undumped or had to be found on software collection CDs with DRM. Many programs that are FOSS don’t even exist prebuilt, you have to compile pico and gz and whatnot on a RS/6000 running AIX 3.2.5 or HP 425t running HP-UX 9, as an example. Good luck finding that program you read about in a magazine, let alone any games or stuff to show off. I’m sure X11 didn’t help matters, being how bloated it was. This is as opposed to MS-DOS, which was very low level in comparison giving you easy direct access to the underlying machine.

The PC-98 selling tons of machines led PC-98 game development to be a primary target for many developers, and especially smaller developers who only had a PC-98. This is not a shock, the same trends were seen in the west when a computer dominated a specific region. However, what makes the PC-98 different is the PC-98 was not sold elsewhere as with the MSX, and it also did not gain a cult following in the west with retrogaming nerds like the FM Towns and X68000 did. You’ll find videos from YouTubers and nerds online talking about those two computers, but you won’t find many talking about the 98 until recently. For the longest time, the PC-98 was this obscure computer that was Japan only.

And then emulators happened and Touhou bloomed in the west. Touhou was originally a PC-98 game, and to play the first 5 games in the series you need an emulator or a real PC-98. On top of this, many visual novels and NSFW games initially got PC-98 versions and later were ported to Windows (due to the fact that many of these games used interpreters, like SCUMM did). This in turn would lead to diehard nerds importing the PC-98 thanks to a newfound interest. This in turn led to fan translations as debuggers improved, leading to PC-98 games getting fan translations online. Many of these are hosted on Discord or GBATemp (due to romhacking.net’s censorship of a certain SNES rom hack that used a no-no word in it), and the PC-98 would get games now playable in English on a real machine or emulator. The problem is, there are hundreds to thousands of PC-98 games that need Japanese knowledge, but simply are not translated to English. Furthermore, many were warez dumps from the 90s which sometimes hid surprises like malware intended for the IBM PC. There’s also the fact that due to a lack of content regulation, many were NSFW or otherwise shocking games. That’s not to say there were lots of games you can safely play with your kids in the room or have your kids play, it’s just there’s a lot of games that you wouldn’t want your coworkers knowing you played.

There’s also of course ports of famous western PC and OSes, including Windows, Netware (only one version is dumped), OS/2 (only 2 versions are dumped), Turbo C++, Turbo Pascal (still undumped), MS Office, and many more.

But this isn’t the sole reason the PC-98 blew up online in certain circles. There’s another crowd, one who doesn’t even care about playing games.

The PC-98 “aesthetic”

The PC-98 featured a unique video system involving two GDC (uPD7220 and later D7220 chips) in a “master/slave” configuration. NEC would then add more VRAM for more colors on screen, a blitter chip to “accelerate” graphics, and finally a 256-color video chip. Due to the video chipset being so tightly integrated, upgrades were impossible and to upgrade the video chipset, you had to buy a new machine or an incompatible video card that mostly had Windows support. To install the video card, you had to connect the video card to the onboard chipset, and a relay would switch over when Windows or one of the few compatible games/programs would load. Complicating things is that the 256-color video chipset only came out in 1993, was standardized on NEC machines in 1995, and was never in Epson clones. Essentially, NEC and Epson were selling PCs with a 486 that could only display 16 colors.

As a result, most games for the PC-98 focused on modes on older machines: first a 640×200 8 color mode similar to that of the PC-8801, before focusing on the iconic 640×400 at 16 color resolution. The PC-98 would let you pick from 16 out of 4096 colors, and the master GDC would overlay text on top of this (and it was really zippy at that). This would give the PC-98 a unique visual aesthetic that was spread via Tumblr posts/blogs and the current day PC-98 Bot. Drawing was a bit different, as art would either be traced with cling wrap or scanned in to the PC-98’s hardware, and then would be colored and edited on the machine itself. Borders were used with minimal colors to increase the number of images that could fit on floppies for Visual Novels, and many PC-98 games used these.

The dual GDC setup also allows for a few other cool parlor tricks like displaying backgrounds on a DOS prompt, using the graphics GDC to display something and then the text GDC overlays the MS-DOS prompt on top of this. This trick can be done with freeware tools, some included in the famous YAHDI image.

But there was another thing the PC-98 would become known for: the music. The sound chip on early models was a YM2203 with 3 FM channels and 3 PSG channels, and it would be succeeded by the YM2608. While western games featured sound written to run on a number of sound cards with MIDI (and also the MT-32, SC-55, many General MIDI wavetable boxes, and more), the PC-98 only had two popular sound chips. There were a few less popular sound chips such as the OPL2 and the Y8950 from the MSX (the Sound Orchestra line), the PC-9801-14 (which had a weird TI chip from analog synths that usually had more chips in the setup), the OPL3 (PC-9801-118/CanBe sound in Windows, SB16 in DOS), but aside from the -14 these cards usually had YM2203 chips for backwards compatibility. Many PC-9801 machines such as the FA and Epson’s clones also had the YM2203 onboard, while the later ones had the YM2608 or it’s cheaper cousin the YMF-288/297 (a 288 with a OPL3 core for Windows) onboard too.

On top of that, Japanese music composers were very familiar with FM sound composition and so they used the sound card in a different manner. Many games featured FM music that was well made, but the later sound cards had PCM chips for Windows, which in DOS was repurposed as a drum channel. Done well, this music has a very distinct sound to it:

Another video on YT goes into more depth about how interesting the PC-98 sound chip was when used properly:

The aesthetics are quite popular with many weebs who cannot read Japanese and as a result it’s influenced many indie games on Steam/itch.io even in the same way the classic Mac aesthetic has.

But there’s one more thing drawing people to them:

PC-98s are still quite cheap in Japan

One of the largest entry barriers to any computer is cost. Amigas come to mind, being very pricey used even if you import one from Europe. UNIX workstations have crept up hard in value as enthusiasts compete with some business running a radiology machine or special program on an old UNIX box with parts dwindling or being hoarded. Put it this way, it’s so bad that when enthusiasts made a PSU replacement for the SGI Fuel, many customers weren’t nerds but businesses trying to keep their fuel in service.

The PC-98 on the other hand was a mass-produced line of computers spanning two decades, and while models popular with businesses (such as the FC-9801 line of factory computers), enthusiasts (the higher end ones with FM onboard), or both (the 98MATE A/A-Mate, or PC-9821Ae/As/An/Ap/Af) go for higher prices, old business models that lack FM that nobody wants can be had for under 5000 yen, and sometimes even less. Keyboards are cheap (they’re not SUN keyboards though, don’t even think about using one on a PC-98 like some normie YouTuber tried), and mice can be substituted with any Microsoft InPort compatible bus mouse. There are also many “junk” models, but given the lack of documentation in English other than google translated websites and “trial and error”, buying a junk one is very much a massive risk. This is especially true with battery leakage, laptop LCD failures, and cap leakage being common on laptops and older machines. Sometimes you can jerry rig an ATX PSU to work, other times you might be looking at a seriously damaged motherboard with eaten traces.

As with importing a car from Japan or Europe, you’ll also have to import replacement parts, which can be slow shipping wise and costs can add up. Basically buy a working model from the mid-late 90s with FM and you’ll be set, while buying an As/Ap/Ap2 will leave you with having to do a motherboard recap and having to also repair any other issues that crop up. There’s also lots of other weird quirks you’ll need to deal with, like making 1.2mb floppies with a USB drive, buying specific RAM upgrades for older models, special CPU upgrades that implement A20 in the way the PC-98 expects, and most importantly Windows/DOS being in Japanese.

There’re a few other quirks, but one that comes to mind is that many games will have timing issues on anything newer than a fast 486 at best, and some games will even have timing issues on anything faster than an 8mhz NEC V30. This isn’t an accident, many PC-98s shipped with this CPU as either a main CPU or a selectable one via DIP Switch 3-8. Flipping the switch allows games that use this CPU to work with no timing issues. There’s the GDC having to be set to 2.5mhz to run without the “split screen” issue, while a handful of games like FlixMix demand a 5mhz GDC clock or you’ll get the “split screen” issue as well. There’s even Epson machines “rebooting” when a game tries to boot because certain versions of DOS and NEC Disk BASIC have an anti-clone check which looks for a NEC string in the ROM, and reboots if the OS cannot find this. You’ll also need a 100v/120v stepdown if you live in a 220v country, or you can get one of the ATX PSU machines like a Ra series, V200, or similar and swap in a switchable voltage PSU. Oh and if you get one without a sound card, you’ll be spending $60-120 on one as well on top of that to make it “usable” for DOS games.

One last quirk I forgot to mention, PC-98s are held together with JIS screws, not phillips screws. They are very easy to strip unless you use a JIS screwdriver like a decent Vessel or whatever comes in that ifixit Mako toolkit/clones like the Harbor Freight one. I’ve heard good things about the Moody Tools set for camera repair (also JIS) but it only goes up to +1, not +2 like Vessel makes.

Tl;dr

The PC-98 is a fun computer that I’ve really gotten into over the past few years (only wagie jobs and being stressed/disinterested in gaming in general has kept me from really playing mine), they’re fun to tinker with and use. Before you buy one and see the shipping costs, just be prepared. Download NP21w or a similar emulator and set it up, and ask yourself if you like the games on it or want to mess with a weird DOS system. If you do, buy it. Emulation for it is still very rough around the edges and it hasn’t had the same breakthroughs like with PCem/86box for PCs, and QEMU/MAME for unloved UNIX workstations and other fun non-x86 boxes and even other nonstandard x86 boxes.

But I’m sure emulation will give you a taste and a desire to import your own, if you want. It definitely gave me something to be interested in, I just need to make some space to hold my PC-98 stash. Maybe this year during one weekend or if I burnout from this latest job and end up quitting it, I’ll get to that.

Reading and writing DD 5.25 disks on a 40 track drive with a greaseweazel (PC-8801, IBM 320/360k, etc.): The “secret sauce”

When writing and reading DD 5.25 disks for the old IBM PC, PC-8801, and similar 40 track formats on a 80 track drive, you’ll run into issues because the software thinks you’re writing an 80 track disk by default. After all, as the PC-9801 showed with it’s 640k 80 track format, there were in fact 80 track DD drives out there and used in at least one popular application (the PC-9801F/VF).

This means that if you want to read and write a 5.25 disk, you’ll need to use a special command. But first, you’ll want to google or look on bitsavers for your floppy drive’s datasheet. Make sure you have the proper jumper set for DD operation, for example on a Mitsubishi drive I had to set my drive to function in 300rpm and 360rpm mode depending on if DD mode was selected. Then; you will want to issue this command:

“gw read –tracks c=0-39:h=0,1:step=2 –dd=L yourimage.scp”

The most important part is the step command, along with the sectors you’re reading. The other important command is –dd=L, this sets pin 2 as low to enable double density reading and let the drive know “hey, this is a DD disk”. This is because 5.25 stupidly had no sense hole like 3.5 did later on. The step command tells the drive to “double step”, and read out a 40 track disk on an 80 track drive. When writing these disks, you will want to do the same:

“gw write –tracks c=0-39:h=0,1:step=2 –dd=L –pre-erase”

This does the same, along with erasing any failed attempts at writing the disk. You’ll probably want to use “gw erase” to wipe the disk as well in this case.

There you go, you’ll now be able to run PC-8801 games on the real hardware assuming both drives are functional.

Mastodon: Dated and broken by design

The past month has been interesting to observe in the fediverse. In just this month alone, many not-so-great things have happened.

• Nitter’s tokens expired around Valentine’s Day as predicted due to Twitter killing the last loophole the project was using (leading it to be declared “dead”), and Graf at least came up with another workaround for his instance (nitter.poast.org) involving buying old Twitter accounts to bypass this. As usual, nobody will leave Twitter.
• Bluesky is now open to anyone to join by using a phone number instead of a invite code, has put out a paper in a journal advertising atproto, and is currently hyped up.
• A programmer announced a Bluesky to Fediverse bridge. This led to a giant flamewar over on the Github page including some copypasta tier posts from Mastodon users paranoid about their federated social network actually federating. This would blow up to the point multiple
  other
  blogs would cover this.
• Turns out Mastodon and other fedi instance stacks also have poor checks against malicious input from other fediverse servers, leading to a massive exploit that consisted of a few lines of code being patched.

This is just what has HAPPENED this month alone, along with two instances in the “free speech” sphere going down: freespeechextremist and the longtime instance from the GNU Social days, shitposter.club.

In other words, Musk Always Wins. Many users online dealing with this are one step closer to saying “fuck this I’m going back to Twitter”. I don’t have some ironic Elon Musk AMV, so this will have to do:

But now, let’s talk about the latest thing to rock the fediverse: the Japanese skid spam attack. Essentially the Japanese side of the fediverse for a while now has been something hard to ignore, with Misskey and its group of forks (be it the now dead Calckey/Firefish, or newer ones like Icefish, Sharkey, and the like) becoming one of the leading forces on the fediverse. I wouldn’t be shocked if Misskey and fork instances had more users overall given the sheer strength of misskey.io. Anyhow, as something gets big enough, the chance that some 12-year-old skids are going to hammer it increases. “It can never happen here” is a bad mindset to have, I learned that when I left the Wi-Fi router open ages ago and I had to tell mom the ISP letter she got for downloading some “porno parody” of Spider-Man was from someone else. This is no exception on the fediverse, as instances get big, and feuds devolve into angry kids banned from an instance exploiting it or other instances.

On top of that with how globalized the world has gotten thanks to technology and the American hegemony, many of the same issues that pop up in the USA will inevitably pop up there. In America, Discord drama whores and skids are associated with the platform (due to its “server” (actually guild) model making anyone feel like they’re a powerful message board moderator), and it’s unsurprising that the same behavior would stretch to Japan too. Which is where today’s drama comes in to play.

Spam the planet!

As a result of something I’m unaware of due to a language barrier, some Japanese skids on Discord decided to flood the fediverse both ads to their Discord server, and spam. Here’s a screenshot of some of this spam:

A rough Google translation of this spam:

Hello! My name is Akihisa Ito, also known as ap12, and I run the criminal organization “Kuroneko Server”! ! ! Did you know about the person kuroneko6423? Please read it first, whether you are familiar with it or not. The criminal organization “Kuroneko” server that he runs carries out various criminal activities on a daily basis. Among them, the most distinctive one is DDoS attack! kuroneko6423 owns a number of DDoS attack tools, and regularly performs DDoS attacks on a large number of servers and causes them to go down! In addition, we operate VOICEVOX reading bot and VOICEROID reading bot on Discord, and we also collect messages and member information via the bot, passwords sent to the server, and personal information (address) of members participating in the server. , phone numbers, credit card information) and sells them to hackers! In this way, Kuroneko Server is a very good criminal organization that is constantly contributing to society! This reading bot is currently available for free! Why not try introducing it yourself? I have attached a list of bots operated by our organization.

So in other words, it’s deranged internet skid drama. Let’s first talk about who is behind this, at least with my lack of Japanese knowledge (mixed with “too much skid” knowledge). The Discord url goes to a group called ctkpaarr. A pixiv dictionary page compares them to Kiwi Farms, but I don’t remember Kiwi Farms being involved in similar spam attacks online. If anything ctkpaarr seems more like a group of skids than people who just want to laugh at the life and times of a drug addict livestreaming himself circling the drain. If the Pixiv post is true and honest, the behavior seems more like that of deranged Discord/Telegram skids than KF. Also related to this is a post on that forum in Japanese that boils down to “internet skid drama” (some underage kid pissed someone off online) complete with an effort to spam message boards as well. Some
fedi
posts I found also tried to explain the situation some more. The tl;dr? Skid drama. Allegedly there’s drama with some 12 year old and he’s being impersonated online and there’s mad skids doing skid things, and that’s all I can make out because a lot of this is very hard to comprehend to anyone outside a certain sphere. All I was able to get from asking a friend who knows the Japanese internet well is that Japanese skids are also in fact out of control and into some of the same zoomer memes.

It’s easy to write off as “who cares” skid drama (because nobody in even the USA version of these parts of the internet cares about ap12 or some Japanese CCP themed Discord server), if not for the fact that it doesn’t stop coming. Initially the spammers loved Misskey, likely due to their familiarity with it and its captcha that can be beaten with an LLM/AI setup. One Misskey instance of this nature was flooded with these spambots. Every single post was scrolling with new template spam posts of this nature, tagging different users on different instances with a flood of messages and disposable accounts.

However, lately the spammers have changed their tricks to get past filters and have been targeting Mastodon instances. Many Mastodon instances as of late have been targeted by these spam posts, including many on masto.host. Here’s one such example, a mastodon instance with only 7 active users being flooded by these messages with the latest format, an image and two tagged users at once:

The owner of the instance left registrations open, and clearly doesn’t understand the risk of it:

An even more blatant example is this masto.host instance, run by an absent account. It’s particularly bad with masto.host because masto.host is one of the few providers out there offering managed Mastodon hosting, for those who think it will take away the nitty gritty moderation issues. But just like how a wordpress blog left abandoned can be a spam vector, the same goes with a Mastodon instance with open registrations that’s left to rot.

Now you might be thinking, why is this a problem on Mastodon instances in particular? Well there’s three reasons: Mastodon has tons and tons of instances people set up and forgot, people didn’t disable registrations, and most importantly Mastodon is broken by design. No really, it is.

What Eugen wants, Eugen gets

To understand why this is such a problem with Mastodon right now, we need to take a step backwards a bit and look at who runs Mastodon. Mastodon is notorious for being run by Eugen Rochko who has a policy of “what he wants, he gets”. It’s his project, and he doesn’t care. On one hand, this brings him detractors not only from users who want features, but from left wing types who also want him to make the most hugboxed platform on earth. On the other hand, Eugen is as notorious as the GNOME “valid use case” Foundation in terms of ignoring issues people have with his project. If search is broken, it’s because it’s a harassment tool (before adding in opt in search after many users were visibly angry). Quote posts also won’t happen because they’re a harassment tool. Having your own favicon for each instance goes against Mastodon’s Corporate Branding, and can’t happen either. Emoji reactions won’t happen because they make Mastodon slower. These are just several features that Pleroma, Misskey, and more openly support. In fact, Soapbox explicitly had server customization as a feature.

This has left Mastodon feeling as if it is the IE6 of fediverse, lagging behind what the cool kids of Pleroma and Misskey can already do (if you don’t run a fork that is). But it gets better. One other notable example of this mindset is that Mastodon has very weak anti-spam measures. This is because Eugen also had that “it could never happen to me” mindset, and in 2018 he said that CAPTCHAs are ableist. After all, think of the blind person using fediverse who can’t read the CAPTCHA. His solution was account approval. Of course this has it’s drawbacks, anyone who has signed up for certain forums including WithTheWill, 68kMLA, and of course the infamous ResetEra know just how getting into some of those forums consists of having good luck. Furthermore you need open signup to be listed on joinmastodon.org.

Fast forward to May 2023. Mastodon finally adds in an imported feature from one of the forks to have post-email captchas, the reason being a spamwave that was hitting Mastodon.social as well and advertising shitcoins. Essentially, it took Mastodon 7 years to add basic moderation features and only in a gimped format that requires you to set up an hCaptcha account and praying they don’t give you the Cloudflare treatment.

This entire situation getting as bad as it is can come down to one thing. It’s because Mastodon has no built-in way of doing captchas without using hcaptcha after an email is sent and accepted (which can cause email spam to increase), and Mastodon also has a problem with users who have no idea of what they’re in for setting up an instance and not disabling sign ups. This isn’t as bad in the Pleroma sphere simply because Pleroma instance owners at least tend to have more internet street smarts and have probably learned the hard way why you don’t set something up with open access to any bum. This is cemented by the fact that most of these spam vector instances are tiny instances run on masto.host or similar by owners who forgot about their instance. Even if you want to do hcaptcha, it should be on the sign in prompt like you know, other instance software can do:

 

Long story short, there are a ton of Mastodon instances with owners who forgot about them, literally running on masto.host or similar VPSes, and everyone forgets about them because what could possibly go wrong anyway. Turns out your 1 user instance with open regs is now a spam vector because you didn’t turn on account approval even. Maybe now Mastodon will force account approval on by default or something to handhold admins who struggle with this. But honestly, given what has happened on the fedi, things could be so much worse. Who knows when these 1 user fedi instances will suffer the Protonmail problem among other things?

Either way the moral of the story is, if you’re running a fedi instance you should actually be using the fedi and turn off registrations if you don’t need them. This entire case is what happens when you fail to disable registrations for your abandoned or single user instance.

Is it any wonder certain people are either going back to Twitter or flirting with Bluesky given the fact that you have to run a fedi instance like a website?

The Internet Cycle: A whitepaper

So today on the fediverse, I learned that Substack is literally doing what any other website that gets a lick of attention does, and that is banning the users who made them big, in this case anyone “branded” as a Nazi. Substack got big based on its lax moderation, but now that Substack wants to become Medium 2 down to it’s moderation policies, it’s now beginning to censor people online. Judging by the article, this is because it caught the attention of corporate whores (who began to wave their big corporate dicks around as a demand):

Last month, 247 Substack writers issued an open letter asking the company to clarify its policies. The company responded on December 21, when Substack co-founder published a blog post arguing that “censorship” of Nazi publications would only make extremism worse.

McKenzie also wrote that “we don’t like Nazis either” and said Substack wished “no-one held those views.” But “we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away,” he wrote. “In fact, it makes it worse. We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power.”

The statement seemed to be at odds with Substack’s published content guidelines, which state that “Substack cannot be used to publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes.”

In its aftermath, several publications left the platform. Others, including Platformer, said they would leave if the company did not remove pro-Nazi publications.

Meanwhile, more than 100 other Substack writers, including prominent names like Bari Weiss and Richard Dawkins, signed a post from writer Elle Griffin calling on Substack to continue with its mostly hands-off approach to platform-level moderation.

From its inception, McKenzie and Substack co-founder Chris Best have touted freedom of speech as one of Substack’s core virtues. As a result, the platform has been embraced by fringe thinkers, who have built large businesses while promoting anti-vaccine pseudo-science, Covid conspiracy theories and other material that is generally restricted on mainstream social networks.

To translate this, the Ivory Tower is really mad right now that people have a centralized place to post, which means enough is enough. The problematic people have to go. Even worse, they’re not allowed to make money. So as a result, they have to go or the big names will go, and maybe even harass payment processors in the process as usual. Sure, they’re removing 5 blogs (without naming them of course), but anyone who saw CloudFlare censor sites because the CEO literally woke up in a bad mood only to say “we double pinkie swear we won’t do this again” before in fact doing it again remembers: they were lying. Substack is essentially on a death watch at this point, and anyone who didn’t have a plan B of wordpress is going to find themselves boned hard.

Do you want know who is completely untouched by this censorship? If you said “someone who self hosts their own blog”, congratulations, you won. In fact, many people who would fall under that branding have been hosting their own wordpress blogs for years to avoid any sort of Automattic and Google censorship. But I might as well prove my point by outlining what someone I knew on Discord years ago called the “internet cycle”. The Internet Cycle is something that every single tech company ends up falling into, but I’ll let him explain it first before I explain it again in more detail.

Stage 1: The creation (We’re not like the other guys)

So here’s the deal: you’re out of college or something and you want that VC money. After all, there’s plenty of VC money to go around, or so it seemed for a while before the rise of interest rates. Anyhow when interest rates are low, this money flows all over the place, and when you’re looking to raise money from the old school types, you just have to solve a problem nobody thinks exists. Or maybe you’re from a big tech company that has fallen victim to its own success and stagnated like Google, and you’re disillusioned with the state of things. You want to make things better, and you think you have an idea: Make something like XYZ but with hookers and blow.

It could be messaging like Discord, or it could be blogging like Substack and thousands of blogging sites, be it LiveJournal, Blogspot, WordPress.com (this site), and many more. Or it could be social networking, like with Bluesky and Nostr having Jack Dorsey around at some point. But here’s your goal, you’re going to be not like those other guys, you promise this time. So you go and launch this website and it’s going to be better than your previous website was.

Stage 2: Growth

You then launch this website, and you get users somewhere. How you advertise it comes down to varying tactics. You can pull a Discord, get streamers to use this program, and then everyone and their mom uses it. Maybe you can even advertise it with “we’re not like the other guys”. Discord famously did this early on.

While Discord was initially for gamers as it’s marketing would brag, what Discord did to get users in was to be as open as Goatse was. The same trend could be seen with other tech sites including Reddit, Substack, and even with copyright content such as with YouTube. These websites got big based on something you could host at one time, which led users in and then led to more people joining in to post on this website. That’s really cool.

But this is how a lot of these sites hook users, by being as lax as possible. Tumblr infamously did this too, by the time the porn ban happened the site was so popular as despite its community being the most hostile online, central moderation was asleep at the wheel.

Stage 3: The normiefication

So after something gets big enough, eventually someone will see something problematic, usually a journalist or Twitter activist. Or some people during a protest retroactively declared illegal will use it to plan or something, or post about it there. That’s when the normiefication of a website begins or hits critical mass. That’s when the payment processors who force you to follow 5 sets of rules to make money clamp down on you. Maybe you don’t want the journalists, or SPLC/ADL types on your back, or Twitter antifa activists (who hold cushy jobs) trying to make sure your business is in ruins, or 6am girl talk sessions, or your providers cutting you off, etc.

If you’re a big tech company, you have lawyers and crisis management, so you can just say that you’ll ban the bad people and maybe even work with the mafia. It’s a great way to rehab your image, while Discord’s reputation has gone from being where “the darn edgy alt right posts” to the service seemingly having a groomer server exposed every other week (and don’t get me started on amber alerts), groups that care about kids online don’t seem to have as much pull as groups trying to track down a teen who said a gamer word. Imagine if you went with a time machine and told the guy who ran Perverted Justice (the group who found pedos for Chris Hansen to humiliate on TV) that Discord, VRChat, and the like would be a thing in a few years. But at least there’s no Nazis, just men trying to groom minors and sell kids drugs and entire infrastructures set up to defend this.

But also on Discord, there was a rebranding. While Discord’s reputation would go from being a “gamer chat service” to groomer paradise by the people they drove out of it, the marketing would shift around the time of the forced lockdowns to be marketing the platform for normies, to have your own personal group.

This was the moment when Discord was no longer some niche gamer app, but rather as mainstream as WhatsApp is, where every wagie at your job who is under 28 has it installed on his phone.

This didn’t just happen to Discord of course; it’s happened to other websites that used to have vibrant communities and have now become sterile propaganda. Reddit and YouTube also used to have vibrant communities, and now they are so sterilized that you could literally use gpt2 to simulate a convincing Reddit conversation, and don’t get me started on the slop on YouTube.

Sometimes it happens out of order as well, like Tumblr banning porn as the site was massive, essentially dealing a huge blow to the site it has never been able to recover from. Now Tumblr is like MySpace, where the only people who want to use it are people who want to relive some glory days chasing the eternal dragon of the past.

Stage 3 (Bad Ending):

The other alternative to the website getting too big and then normiefied is the website ends up on life support like Odysee is today, or killed off like vidme was, or killed off completely like many of the smaller streaming sites were back in the day. Everyone goes back to the mainstream site and just gets defeated until the cycle repeats and this time it won’t be like the last time I promise. This doesn’t seem to happen to established sites as Skype is like a cockroach that won’t die for some reason.

The Alternative

Discord right now is known to be a very sterile dumpster fire, a shell of its former self compared to how it was nearly 10 years ago. But the people who made the site big have moved onto greener pastures. I’m talking websites with much less censorship like Telegram, or most importantly self-hosted platforms such as Matrix or XMPP. Here’s the thing, self hosted websites always win in the end for multiple reasons.

The first is that using a single major platform is one big weakpoint, be it for censorship or hacking. Every single website branded as alt-tech has faced this issue. GiveSendGo was hacked, Gab had provider issues and hacking, Parler was hacked, Epik was hacked, Kiwi Farms has had the great troon war, the Daily Stormer was censored too many times, the list goes on and on. It’s a great source to attack if you want to censor people who never learn online. But having something spread out over numerous VPSes, cpanel shithosts, and colocated servers across the USA means there’s far more points to take down and not just one. This also means only people who want to see you will find you as a result, as being jacked into a big social media network is risking that some mentally unstable shut in who wants to fight people online will discover you, which means it’s over. Keep in mind, Kiwi Farms has the issues it does because of one ex-Google employee.

The second is simpler. It’s that you’re not chained to the whims of whatever company is pulling the strings. When Discord purged servers starting in August 2017, so many people were caught in the crossfire. While I was not banned, Discord did force me to add and verify my phone number on my account at the time, which in the years since has been regarded as one such social media punishment to force users to “self dox”. Others I knew were not so lucky and had their accounts banned.

The third is that every company that seems to be lax moderation wise either ends up being forced to clamp down the second they get slightly popular, or can’t find enough money and closes down. They will sell their users out to have a seal of approval from the big tech companies and journalist caste. Sites like Omegle end up having to shut down because of predators using them, but Discord gets to stay up.

So while big tech corporations are too busy playing games to please people who can never be pleased, let’s be honest here. The future is to self host your own site, be it wordpress or whatever flashy new web blogging service with limp bizkit MP3s. The trick is to get powerful enough away from a big tech company or on your own that you can literally do whatever you want and nobody can stop you. That is, if you’re not so big that the minute you’re canned from your TV under pressure from a network, another website picks you up right then, and you can take selfies of yourself laughing at all the stuff people are writing about you.

Because let’s be real, if you’re in this part of the internet, you already know the truth. No matter what you do to please someone online, it’s never going to be enough. Just laugh in their face, maybe do what the zoomers called “dab on the haters”.

But at the same time, learn from the past. Don’t join the next walled garden. Join the decentralized internet, and never worry about a walled garden clamping down on its users ever again.

A federated art site proposal

Ever since the fall of DeviantArt and furry art galleries burning up, I’ve had a theory that someone should start a new art site. When I realized that would be impractical given the risks and drama associated, I put this idea to the back of my mind. Then when I discovered the fediverse I realized, it could work but as something in the fediverse. After all, it’s something the internet sorely lacks and that I could make a good use case for using the fedi for. Unfortunately I’m just an idea guy as of now, so I’m posting this in the hopes that either I’ll remember this or someone else will.

One Loss Condition (or how the fedi can still win)

Before I talk about art sites, I’d like to talk about the one loss condition for any big social media platform. What do I mean by one loss condition? Well, a blackpilling post from a host of an infamous website circa 2019 essentially said that in the social media sphere, there was “no loss condition” against the big tech companies. The post for context was written in better economic times, when it seemed like big tech companies had an infinite spigot of money from investors to prop up a website that made no money, after all why do you think Jeff Bezos bought a newspaper? The post highlights that YouTube never made money, and then points to what was at the time YouTube’s latest announcement that they will in fact manipulate what you see.

To summarize: if you watch something Alphabet does not want you to watch, it will start suggesting videos it does want you to watch. They go for the benign and easy example of Flat Earth Theory. If you watch a video about how the Earth is flat, it will propose you watch an ‘authoritative’ video on how that isn’t true. YouTube will start doing this with everything it wants, in accordance to its political objectives, and it will not tell you suggestions are politically motivated when doing so.

This continues to this day, with YouTubers complaining about how they can’t get views and asking why this is the case (it’s the algorithm):

While BreadTubers and approved political content creators will always be recommended by the algorithm, such as Not Just Bikes (an urban “soyboy” out of touch with America’s demographics as one blogger described him):

That’s in between channels such as MrBeast, who always seem to show up on a frontpage on a private tab, without fail in between slop “playlist” videos and compilations that are stuck in 2008.

Essentially, YouTube is pretty much a great example of how a big tech site can kill a community while also illustrating everything wrong with big tech in one site. The only saving grace with YouTube is that “at least it’s not Twitch”, but YouTube rules have been slowly following Twitch when it comes to censorship and how strict they are. If you’re wondering why videos depicting crazy events on YouTube have to have 4000 disclaimers declaring it’s bad as if you’re watching a North Korea propaganda video, this is why. If you get a strike on YouTube, to even start the 6-month timer you now have to go through a “copyright school” reeducation session online. It’s literally that bad these days.

Anyhow; back to the post since I’m sure you get my point that YouTube sucks. The post starts by talking about how it’s only targeting Americans with this propaganda measure (not to worry as in 2022, YT would roll this out on countries taking in refugees, with a Google corporate propaganda post using the term “prebunking“). This is also mentioned here with how Google could in theory, push LGBT related channels in a Slavic country (where the older generation is not a fan of it but the younger generation is apathetic, see Japan too) if it thinks the user is underage (and kids have come out as trans from YouTube channels from influencers saying “this fixed me”). He also mentions the panopticon of Facebook, the illusion of choice it offers with Instagram/Whatsapp being owned by them, and Twitter’s shady algorithm (that would be confirmed later with the Twitter Files, along with FBI involvement).

But most importantly, it mentions that alternative sites were “containment sites”, with no reason to join if you weren’t banned from Twitter and even if you’re not banned; you’ll find it hard to reach a new audience outside the echo chamber. It mentions how a Twitter news reposter/journalist was banned from the platform for “ban evasion” because he pissed someone off and had been banned before, and how essentially if you’re locked out of Twitter you’re locked out of one of the most important websites (this is why Elon Musk called it a “digital town square” and he was 100% right).

Yet the point he made with all these issues he mentioned is very simple. In 2019, these corporations were truly the epitome of “too big to fail” or they seemed that way. They seemingly had infinite money to burn, and nothing short of rules requiring social media neutrality or payment processor neutrality (which in his eyes, is one of the biggest roadblocks to alternative sites) would peacefully neuter them. While the post throws out the idea of attacks on the headquarters of big tech companies, it also mentions that it’s unlikely to do anything given the CEOs are already living on private islands and the developers are expendable.

I disagree with this final assumption, especially with the state of the internet in 2023. I think that there is such a loss condition for Twitter and especially smaller sites. Twitter being a “digital public square” and huge online has given it immunity from many things that would kill smaller sites. So far Twitter has managed to withstand among other things:

• A very divisive owner
• Ban waves and “soft censorship” like throttling
• Even the POTUS being banned pre-Musk
• Bluechecks doxing people while being followed by Jack Dorsey (complete with a guest appearance from an infamous consent accident haver)
• Layout changes
• Killing features people liked
• A site rename
• Forcing you to login to view most posts
• Tumblr’s userbase migrating over and bringing over its harassing behavior
• Journalists and Bluechecks no longer getting special treatment
• The ADL being mad

The thing with Twitter is, it seems too big to fail. Many of these things have killed similar sites, but Twitter’s status as a digital town square means that people will come back over and over again, even after being constantly harassed by mentally ill users because a different Twitter account used them as an attack dog. For a site the size of Twitter to go down, what it needs to do is go down for maybe a month or months at a time, with uncertainty about it’s future. The second thing is that users need a similar, well-polished website to go to that actually works. As seen with No Man’s Sky, the currently still dodgy Halo Master Chief Collection, Windows Vista, the Xbox One announcement, and many more products and services, a poor first impression can taint something forever (especially if it’s not fixed quickly). If there isn’t a new website that exists right then and is ready to handle the load, one of three things will happen:

• Users will migrate to a dissimilar website right away (post-Porn ban Tumblr)
• Users might try to migrate to a new site, only to find out that there’s drama, infighting, admins who aren’t up for the task, and then move to some dissimilar site anyway.
  • This can be seen with the collapse of 8chan and Fred’s war on imageboard culture, leading to the webring trashfire, 8chan becoming 8kun, and then Mark schisming off into his own little website called 8chan.moe (really only used for /v/, which he was the admin of).
  • Not all bunkers were failures. In at least one case with the 4chan /qa/ board being locked after the infamous /lgbt/ raid, the “sharty” would replace it and be completely unchained from 4chan’s rules.
• There will be a void where there is just someone waiting to fill the void (Vine).

The last one is the one I want to talk about here, because this is where it gets interesting. See, Twitter bought this really cool video sharing app called Vine or something where you could share 7 second videos and it was massive. There were so many dancing videos, dumb jokes/memes, and similar in the app, and you could find these by infinitely scrolling. Gee, this sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Well I’ll get to that in a moment, but instead of showing you what was on the app I’ll show you how the app was used.

So the story for Vine was identical to that of every interesting tech company of the late 2000s-mid 2010s. They had a good thing going for them with this app, they cashed out to be bought by a bigger tech company, and what do you know it got shut down. Vine lasted from 2013 to around 2016-7, but it’s brief impact was clearly felt. Why do I say this? Well in 2016 I’m sure someone in China saw that this Vine app was big, and as normal in the Chinese tech market some tech CEO was there with their state approved clone of it: Douyin. In 2018 their worldwide app (known as TikTok) was launched, and in 2020 the app would just explode.

Sure, TikTok allows videos longer than 7 seconds, but what made TikTok big wasn’t that. It was that it picked up on a void Vine left behind, namely the “infinite scrolling” part and capitalized on this aspect of the app. It’s not uncommon to be in a room of wagies just mindlessly scrolling short TikTok videos of under a minute, and then scrolling to the next one. This is because TikTok capitalized on the void Vine left, and then maximized user engagement and hooking users in.

It’s going to be hard to replace Twitter, because quite frankly Twitter users want something 1:1 just like Twitter complete with the algorithm, and there is nothing that is forcing people to leave. However, there is one category of sites that has a giant hole in it and this is where something could happen.

The slow burn of art sites

Once upon a time there was a website named DeviantArt. While the website was constantly mocked for low-quality fetish artwork and random anime fanartists getting big on the site, the website was a true gem. It had obscure art niches, some genuinely good artists on the site, Windows skins and similar, and more. There were groups, groups to put your art in, related tabs, and whatnot. Browsing DeviantArt eons ago makes me wish I saved more art (given how much managed to dodge archive.org and how mentally ill artists love to delete their galleries), and while much of the internet mocked the “best” of the site it had a really good thing going for it. Essentially, the layout of DeviantArt just werked. Case in point; try browsing a profile or image from 2015. You’d see related, groups it was featured in, a nice readable layout, and both from the artist and website suggestions, along with groups the image is featured in and collections. Really cool, wasn’t it? This layout was similar in 2013 as well.

Unfortunately, something bad happened to DeviantArt in 2019, alongside the usual “Twitter getting big and diverting attention”. That on its own along with the Tumblr porn ban shoving more onto it was bad enough, and a post in 2019 lamented the fall of art galleries like DeviantArt. It lamented the loss of the DeviantArt community which was focused on real interaction instead of maximizing the dopamine receptors. But what really killed DeviantArt after that post was when Wix bought them just two months prior. The website would undergo multiple changes including a new puritan moderation system, but most infamously it forced a very much hated user interface down the throat of people known as “Eclipse”. This new user interface was soulless and corporate, mimicking that of another art site designed for wagies to show off their technical but “empty” artwork known as ArtStation. To say it led to a user exodus under the threat of Twitter is an understatement, as many artists abandoned their accounts. Some would even blank them after the AI training and image generator controversy.

Hence; it’s not uncommon to find an artist who replaced his or her gallery with a meltdown post, which is sometimes combined with crawling into a deeper hugbox:

Or let’s take a look at the artist I previously used as an example earlier, let’s see what his DeviantArt page looks like now despite him still uploading:

Meanwhile other art sites aren’t much better. Newgrounds still has the reputation of being the “flash site you went to as a kid to play edgy games” and not a serious art gallery, and it had censorship scandals too at some point as well (I have also heard somewhere that the admins decide what drawings are and aren’t of age). Pixiv is Japanese for the most part and allows most art, but I’ve heard they might be censoring to pander to the whims of payment processors (I haven’t heard anything concrete other than booth.pm/fanbox cracking down on porn because of payment processors). FurAffinity is mostly furry only and the admins have been ban happy as of late for many things, also the website’s code is terrible. Inkbunny is much better than FurAffinity in the same niche, but has the containment site reputation due to allowing cub (basically furry lolisho). There are some other furry art galleries like Weasyl, SoFurry, and Furry Network that someone out there might use but these sites are irrelevant mostly since they offer nothing FurAffinity does not also have content wise. Then there’s ArtStation which is the LinkedIn or Vimeo of art sites, it’s where you post when you have talent and repress the creativity in favor of making yet another piece of high budget corporate slop, when the concept art is actually cool but the final product is meh. But all of these sites have one thing in common: they’re always a side gallery for artists when their main one is Twitter. In fact; notably missing from this artist’s profile that I used are any sort of art sites that anyone knows about. I literally never heard of Itaku until today:

The problem with social media sites for art:

The problem is, social media sites just suck for art. There are numerous issues with the websites including but not limited to:

• Discoverability just sucks, you’re stuck with hashtags only. There’s no recommended, groups, or anything.
• Image quality is compressed and the resolution is downsampled
• The community is one of the most drama prone online

The most notable issue with Twitter right now is the community, and how it is prone to drama, infighting, and political drama. An old post I’d like to share that I saw from 2014 highlighted the problem with Tumblr/Twitter’s community for artists in particular too. Essentially, Tumblr only allowed you to reblog something while adding something (think quote posts on meth) with inline reply fights being extremely common.

What happens is – someone makes a statement which is controversial by Tumblr standards, like “Protect Doctor Who fans from kitten pic sharers at all costs.” A kitten pic sharer sees the statement, sees red, and reblogs it to her followers with a series of invectives against Doctor Who fans. Since kitten pic sharers cluster together in the social network, soon every kitten pic sharer has seen the insult against kitten pic sharer – as they all feel the need to add their defensive commentary to it, soon all of them are seeing it from ten different directions. The angry invectives get back to the Doctor Who fans, and now they feel deeply offended, so they reblog it among themselves with even more condemnations of the kitten pic sharers, who now not only did whatever inspired the enmity in the first place, but have inspired extra hostility because their hateful invectives are right there on the post for everyone to see. So about half the stuff on your dashboard is something you actually want to see, and the other half is towers of alternate insults that look like this:

Essentially the #1 problem with Tumblr’s community is that it was full of miserable people, empowered by the features on Tumblr’s website. Even without Tumblr, these people thrive on Twitter and no matter how hard you try to avoid them, they are always and I mean always on the timeline. It doesn’t matter what you do. While many furries remember when every furry porn artist was saying something about George Floyd to avoid being canceled, the same thing went on over at Tumblr all the damn time:

If you’re not on Tumblr, you might have missed the “everyone who does not reblog the issue du jour is trash” wars. For a few weeks around the height of the Ferguson discussion, people constantly called out one another for not reblogging enough Ferguson-related material, or (Heavens forbid) saying they were sick of the amount of Ferguson material they were seeing. It got so bad that various art blogs that just posted pretty paintings, or kitten picture blogs that just reblogged pictures of kittens were feeling the heat (you thought I was joking about the hate for kitten picture bloggers. I never joke.)

When art communities moved to Twitter, a website with less discoverability and community interaction, this problem became so much worse. Yet these social media platforms are addicting, both with Twitter giving you more exposure but also how easy it is to get involved with outrage porn. Speaking of that; it’s not uncommon for Twitter artists to get mobbed by Roblox kids and similar when they see something they don’t like, meaning that even this whole idea is controversial in this day and age. To add to that the internet is irreversibly fragmented in a way never seen before. In the words of an rdrama post I’ll paraphrase, one political side thinks the worst thing you can do as a person is to murder someone or sexually abuse kids, while the other side sees the worst thing you can do is being heckin racist.

Where do we go from here?

Here’s the problem: trying to make a new art site traditionally is going to be a nightmare. If you ban something, you risk giving people no reason to sign up or you’ll deal with more people asking you to ban more and more. If you don’t ban something, your site is a containment site like Inkbunny is. Keep in mind, as the loli question shows you will get militant replies on both sides. There’s going to be payment processor issues (see FurAffinity and AlertPay, PayPal in general, Patreon’s current issues), possibly web hosting issues from crazy people going after your site for posting art they don’t like (see: the early days of e621), and most important groups that cannot tolerate each other signing up. It will not work, and if you want proof, just ask the furry fandom:

Thanks to social media, groups being diluted by “normies”, and most importantly every schmuck finding out he can get social capital on twitter.com by pretending to be morally outraged by something, there are a lot of incompatible groups online. Being someone like me overlapping with several incompatible subcultures is a recipe for disaster as with most people, interests and hobbies are like your cable TV and come as a package deal. Just like how you can’t save money by dropping ESPN or sportsball channels, you can’t be a shitposter and furry without causing massive amounts of chaos. If you are a furry, you are also expected to have leftist politics (which these days means gay sex, supporting people who secretly hate that, and giving kids Lupron/HRT) and you can find posts from both sides saying the same thing. Even better, a documentary made by a person of gender even serves to solely reinforce this mindset, that said community is a package deal of politics alongside being a monoculture. This only serves to worsen this problem.

Yet at the same time, the art gallery landscape falls into the loss condition for what makes a big social media site fail: art sites are essentially dead at this point and they are leaving a big website shaped void online. A few years ago while out vaping I came up and then gave up on the idea of making a new art site for this reason. But a few years later, with the mental clarity afforded by my discovery of the fedi, I have come up with a solution possibly for this.

Enter the federated art gallery

So here is why I think the future of art sites is going to be federated somehow. First of all; in this climate it is impossible to recreate old websites without being forced to cave to avoid losing payment processors of some sort or hosting (and especially scaring users, given online artists are easily offended). The culture that worked in 2012 will not work again in 2023 given how fractured and divided the internet is. The hosting model has to adapt.

This is where the federated model pays off. It avoids the containment site problem by being federated. As a bonus, it allows anyone on Pleroma/Mastodon/Misskey to repost your art, meaning you already are given an audience. Finally, it takes care of the “what content can you host” issue by leaving it up to each admin with the possibility of being self-hosted. This isn’t even speculation either, two fediverse instances have become well used among artists: baraag.net (which has minimal censorship) and misskey.io (which has “Japanese rules” as in the censor bars). While they still suffer from the Twitter timeline model, both websites are now some of the largest on the fediverse. Furthermore, Misskey.io has helped make Misskey even larger than Pleroma when it comes to fediverse instance software. Both websites have boomed hosting in particular, content that on other sites would get nuked with “blocking tags alone is not enough”.

The fediverse didn’t take off because of fediblocking, it took off in spite of it. It took off because when you are banned from all of the big social media sites at the same time, or are targeted by a smear campaign accusing you of making someone kill himself, you can still post and the best part is, you can post away from the people who want to scream in every chat you post in. The fediverse is where the last remnants of imageboard culture went after Fred thought he had snuffed it out with his buddies in the media and furry erp harem. I feel it is where the next generation of art site will happen, at least with the artists who can see where the wind is blowing and aren’t chasing dollar signs like a cat chasing a laser pointer.

Maybe it won’t be solely stock activitypub, given that a lot of features DeviantArt has might not exactly work over it. After all ActivityPub is designed to be for Twitter clones for the most part it seems (see: how lemmy threads look on Masto/Pleroma). But given that artists have staying power even more than ecelebs do (leading to more users joining as a result), this would actually be a boost for any sort of federated network.

Maybe one day I’ll decide to write this, but right now it’s above my pay grade. My goal right now is to even learn basic programming and maybe art, so I’m honestly going to be focusing on that. I’m just throwing this idea out there for if I get around to it, or when someone else gets the same idea as I do and implements this.

 

The logic of offshoot sites (A pure schizopost)

There’s a very common saying on this side of the internet, “nothing ever happens”. The phrase exists for a very good reason, every time you log into the internet you hear hype about how something big is going to happen ranging from war to climate change to something something Trump or Elon Musk, and yet nothing seemingly happens. All that hype just faded away, everyone forgets they were saying something is going to happen, and everyone moves onto the next thing. Someone gets arrested…but then released a day later. Some old white guy is killed by thugs but there’s no backlash against “activist district attorneys” let alone a “race war” as /pol/ wants. Some people drop dead or have serious side effects from the vaccine to the point an athlete nearly dies on TV…but nobody ever is charged and the only people who talk about this are online. An election can have suspicious results…and the only thing that happens is the people who make the voting machines sues anyone who says they’re insecure for a billion dollars (and the people who made a movie saying voting is insecure suddenly do a 180 on Twitter…funny how that works). The hockey stick graph hasn’t exactly happened yet, and instead everything else is a result of climate change. A leader can be voted into office and he will do nothing he said he’d do when he was elected (either neolibs doing nothing the online communists want or populist right wingers caving into everyone). Don’t get me started on how the Russia-Ukraine war was going to be WWIII or cause nukes to be dropped or something, or how the counter offensive would be successful, etc. Or how the current Israel war seems to be another example of trench warfare and nothing too crazy happening.

This has happened so many times at this point that after the great big COVID scare, “two more weeks” has become a sarcastic internet catchphrase along with the now repurposed right-wing boomer slogan “trust the plan”. The first one mocks how governments handled the COVID scare, and the second phrase mocks how boomer talk show hosts in particular love to talk about how “the right people are in control, trust the plan, everything you want to happen will if you sit back and do nothing” to lull boomers who prefer being passive into being even more passive (in particular referencing the QAnon scam, which was described by some as “hope porn” for boomers). But the main reason I’m bringing this up here has to do with Twitter and alternatives to it.

You see; it’s been a year now since Elon Musk bought Twitter and some e-celebs were making a big deal about how Twitter is going to die now, the servers are going to go offline now, it’s going to utterly collapse now, you just wait and see. My favorite e-celeb stunt was when one decided to put some cabbage/lettuce he bought at a store in front of a webcam for his “leaving Twitter forever” posts and was trying to take pics to see “would the lettuce rot by the time Twitter goes down”. It’s been a year now and we all know the answer to that one.

Twitter might slowly be boiling the frog, by forcing logins, temporarily breaking nitter.net, and of course Elon Musk going from the star of the media to hated by the world. After all, with Trump out of office, someone had to take his place and it’s easy to forget just what the media said about him years ago.

Musk grabs a coffee-table book published by The Onion and starts leafing through it, laughing hysterically. “In order to understand the essential truth of things,” he theorizes, “I think you can find it in The Onion and occasionally on Reddit.” Afterward, he asks excitedly, “Have you ever seen Rick and Morty?” And the conversation bounces from that animated show to South Park to The Simpsons to the book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

See? That quirky real-life Tony Stark or modern-day Howard Hughes who is spearheading space travel even watches Rick and Morty and browses Reddit. He’s just like you and me.

But either way, Elon Musk has absolutely made the media angry nowadays and if you search his name, he has replaced Donald Trump as an object of hate like I said. So as a result, there’s a huge pent-up demand (at least in the eyes of some) for a new Twitter clone. Okay, I disagree. See; there isn’t as much as there was for the Tumblr porn ban. But to explain this, I’m going to define offshoot sites into two categories: Containment Sites and Reactionary Sites.

Two kinds of sites: Reactionary and Containment sites

So what exactly is a containment site and what is (what I am terming) a reactionary site? To explain this; I’ll use real world examples for each to define each site. These two categories are not strict, and many websites such as 8chan/8kun fit the characteristics of both sites.

A containment site is a website which serves to “contain” a userbase from a different website for some reason or another. These websites are defined by various characteristics, including:

• The website either solely exists to or serves the purpose of hosting a userbase that has been banned from numerous major websites.
• The motive for making the site is solely due to users or discussion topics being banned from another site.
• A userbase that repels people from outside this community for some reason or another.
• Does not appeal to you if you’re not part of the audience banned.
• Has a higher chance of having an echo chamber effect, a lower chance of being seen outside of said group, etc.
• Growth depends on users being banned or censored from a website.

There are many examples of containment sites online, or websites that started as such. FurAffinity and Inkbunny both started as one, while pretty much all of the companies that fall under the “alt-tech” sphere for some reason or another (including Gab, Voat (dead), 8chan/8kun/whatever its latest incarnation is now, BitChute, and even Odysee/LBRY, Rumble, GiveSendGo, and many more) are known for having such an audience even if they did not intend on it. These websites do in fact gain easy audiences but for one reason; these users cannot go back to Twitter or other big tech sites. Therefore, these users are stuck on one site. There are plenty of issues with the containment site model. For example, these websites can have many security lapses due to a combination of mismanagement and a lack of intelligent staff, and multiple alt-tech sites were hacked which led to direct retaliation against users there as a result. GiveSendGo donators were harassed or had banking issues, Parler and Gab were hacked with the former having information on unauthorized protesters being sent to the FBI, and other sites have had hosting/banking issues as a result of being targeted. This isn’t just a thing with right wing political sites; FurAffinity has been targeted with spam attacks and InkBunny has had to openly make clear in the rules they do not want pedophiles signing up. Much of these websites are also known for a very distinct community that repels anyone outside the group signing up for it, leading to an echo chamber effect at times.

Other times, the topic that causes users to start a containment site doesn’t need to be politically loaded. There were a lot of topics the big name Pokemon forums like BMGf and Serebii Forums (or SPPf) were banning discussion of; with two that come to mind being ROM hacking and save file modding. PokeCommunity Forums and the Project Pokemon Forums built up communities solely on discussing these taboo topics. In particular, Project Pokemon started up based on discussion around the classic Pokemon save file modification utility PokeSAV and other Pokemon series hacking information, while PokeCommunity became the main hub for Pokemon ROM hacks and whatnot.

But most importantly, for these sites to pop up there has to be nowhere else for them to go. When Tumblr died nobody stepped up to the plate to make a similar site until it was years too late to make a dent (and even with some of these sites such as Cohost, the moderation is nowhere near as lax as it was during the golden age of Tumblr). Pillowfort never quite took off as the website was running into security issues (and is still paywalled), while Cohost literally launched in 2022; far too late to make a dent or impact. I’m fairly sure all the big Pokemon forums banning discussion of Pokemon leaks also led discussion to shift over to big tech run social media platforms due to their lax moderation of the time.

This is essential, because the problem with using any alternative website is that you run the very real risk of having zero exposure on said site. This is especially true if your site is blacklisted from search engines.

Reactionary sites (as I am defining it) are notable for something else. These websites were not started for people banned from another website but were started as a reaction towards something happening to another site. Maybe management sold the site out or screwed over staff/the users, but these sites exist for one of two reasons. The first type of these sites caters to a group banned from another site (but the users really want that site back), so they launch a site that’s just like the site they’re addicted to posting on but with hookers and blow. With a few exceptions, these sites aren’t that active because there is nothing on there for those banned from a big site such as Twitter, but also nothing that they can’t see on Twitter either. Sometimes they even cater to users of that site just angry at a certain person running the site. These sites are only successful if the original website goes down for good, or does something that makes the userbase schism like with ResetEra breaking off of NeoGAF to the point neither site has remotely the same culture anymore. Some such sites also end up as containment sites; with many SomethingAwful and a few Kiwi Farms offshoot sites being this way.

Some examples of a forum going down for good include AssemblerGames schisming off into several sites online (including ObscureGamers, which also lost users after high-profile drama) or DPReview nearly going down until it found a new buyer (A few sites started out as bunkers before DPReview was confirmed to be stable). 8chan’s months long shutdown also led to a schism of imageboard culture as the replacements would infight hard, and lots of bunkers and offshoots were set up as a result. I won’t get into the nitty gritty of this and to be honest I don’t know too much about what went on there, but I did see some of the same trends.

Some of the characteristics of a site such as this include:

• The motive of making the site is either “revenge” towards the staff, or because a site’s demise seems imminent.
• Tries to be “just like an old site” but better.
• Oftentimes mimics the rules, UI, and moderation of the old site.
• Tries to have a wider mass appeal and replace the other site
• Can double as a containment site, but with fewer users in many cases.

Reactionary sites tend to have a history of not doing so well, namely due to their tendency to have all the disadvantages of a containment site but without the carrot of being able to say funny racial slurs, discuss banned topics, or posting banned artwork. These sites only do well if the original website goes down, and they’re started just in time to tell people this new site is where to go. I also hope you have the moderation and servers in place to handle the new userbase, the skids who want to hack your site, etc.

A tale of two sites: Weasyl and Inkbunny

The nice part about having a blog is that I can talk about furry drama without a 14 year old in a Tap-Out T-Shirt cutting me off in a Discord call and calling me a degenerate autist while I’m explaining crazy things I saw online. In this case; I’m going to be talking about two furry art sites: one a reactionary site and one a containment site. So let’s talk about the background here; FurAffinity as an art site is absolutely terrible. The rules suck and are constantly being tightened for no reason, the backend is garbage, the site is missing numerous features literally everyone else has implemented years ago, let alone features that would be useful for the creative furry scene such as having a character list or something. It still chugs along for two reasons: the back catalogue (which is shrinking with new rules rolled out), and the fact that “everyone else uses it”. Oh, and Tumblr/Twitter were more attractive to artists than an obscure furry art site is because it has people using it.

The first website I’m going to take a look at is Weasyl, a very much reactionary furry art site. Now Weasyl is an art site you might not have heard of and this is for a very good reason. These days it’s languishing in obscurity. The Github account for it still gets commits, but the blog hasn’t gotten a post since 2021 and the Twitter account since 2020. In fact, a post on the lead dev/admin’s page asked if the site was still active/in active development. I am sure someone still uses it as a main site instead of as a website loaded up into PostyBirb, but for most furries it’s not even on their radar (someone will disagree with me on this). Searching FurAffinity.net brings up far more results in my Telegram client than Weasyl.com does anyway.

It’s a shame because Weasyl is in many ways the anti-furaffinity. The code is FOSS and you can see it being updated still. The website supports numerous and I mean numerous features FurAffinity does not, including especially high-res image uploading. It probably has better moderation than FurAffinity does, considering an AI can do it better I’m sure. But what really made Weasyl get hyped up was what happened in the mid-2010s with the furry fandom. See; FurAffinity notoriously went into a week or so of downtime with read-only mode, and then on top of that furaffinity was just badly run. This peaked with an infamous hack in 2016 leading to passwords being leaked. For years, furries were totally going to leave FurAffinity forever. Guides were made, reddit talked about moving off complete with manifestos that stated their issues with the site, and multiple
migration tools were made. Does this all sound familiar?

So; what happened to Weasyl to the point where it became as irrelevant as Mitsubishi cars are today? Well, it’s simple really. Weasyl only got two kinds of users: people who hated FurAffinity going down, and people who hated Dragoneer (but weren’t breaking the cub rule, more on this later). It also gets artists uploading high resolution copies of their artwork, for people who don’t want to touch Inkbunny, and for artists who don’t paywall it behind Patreon. But most importantly, Tumblr hadn’t banned porn yet and Twitter was looking awfully attractive, and so many more artists moved to sites where the users were. Free from the shackles of the furry containment site sphere, they could spread their artwork far and wide.

But most importantly; Weasyl offered nothing that you can’t find on FurAffinity or big social media sites. FurAffinity has notoriously banned art of “cub” (essentially furry lolisho) characters, and Weasyl followed suit from day one it seems. There was no controversy because it was banned to begin with. Unfortunately, these rules are also notoriously vague and tend to be a matter of “does the admin like this”.

So what happens when an art site allows this art? Well, you’ll end up with the curious case of Inkbunny.net. See, Inkbunny is also a furry art gallery that’s also more advanced than FurAffinity is but with a difference; cub art is allowed without humans. In fact, FurAffinity banning such art is exactly why Inkbunny got so popular and has as many users as it does. There are users who will only post to Inkbunny as a result, but the problem is merely mentioning that kind of art is bound to provoke two kinds of people, a crowd that says drawings have rights and the other that really is obsessive about jacking it to cartoons. As a result, many artists are on only Inkbunny, and many refuse to touch the site because blacklisting the cub art isn’t enough, it must not exist on the same site as them. There’s also plenty of creepy users as a result of the cub thing, managing to top Japan’s horniest otakus who managed to turn into a meme.

To add to this, every time something like FurAffinity tightening rules on what art is allowed happens, Inkbunny gets hammered with new traffic because it’s seen as a place that will let you upload whatever with minimal moderation.

Essentially; the containment site model is a blessing and a curse. It ensures a website will always have new traffic and a new audience, but it also appeals mostly to those banned from a different website. A reactionary website can only work if the original site goes offline, as if you’re not banned from the original site you have no reason to use this offshoot site. This is why Inkbunny is still a known name in the furry sphere. Inkbunny caters to an audience banned from mainstream furry sites; at the expense of an audience who sees no reason to sign up and is likely actively repulsed by the users there.

The fediverse and containment sites

So what about the fediverse and it’s role in all of this? Well, I like to see the fediverse as a containment site. The point I made about two fediverses also applies here. One segment of the fediverse is banned from Twitter, and one is signing up because Elon Musk is a meanie. There’s a lot of parallels to the furry art sites here with instances. To reframe my post about the two fediverses here; one side of the fediverse is here because they cannot go back to Twitter, and one side is here because they hate Elon Musk. On top of that, even the left wing side of the fediverse is fractured as a result of there being two kinds of users: “normies” who listen to NPR/Freespeech.org, and the diehard schizophrenic leftists who will harass you if you don’t use CWs or alt-text on your post. I mean, for those people maybe the fedi acts as a sort of containment site, for internet leftists so neurotic that all their half-hearted friends ghost them.

The more open side of the fediverse absolutely loves being a containment site for specific people, and aside from Alex Gleason (who has similar goals to that of Eugen with different stances on speech/trans issues/veganism) many of them wouldn’t have it any other way. One instance will have users asking you to say a racial slur when you sign up. Another instance has admins who will nuke your account if you don’t post your fetishes after signing up. These in a way serve to ward out normies and infiltrators to some degree, given many would not want to be caught dead saying racial slurs. They want to find people like them online, and they know it’s a source of quality user growth. They know someone joining because they’re banned from Twitter will stick around, because they cannot go back to Twitter.

Yet at the same time, it’s easy to see why the fediverse can repel normies. Many boomers who voted for Biden will struggle to understand why a bunch of online users are harassing them about “CWs” and “alt-text” or something and why doing anything makes people offended. On the other hand, boomers who voted for Trump don’t understand why every online right community is full of people who will happily tell you why everything you learned in school was a lie, or will chew you out for posting “pull yourselves up by the bootstraps” or “but how does this personally affect you”.

As of now, much of the fediverse is containment, be it from lolisho artists/fans or schizophrenic political “extremists”. But what about 5 years down the line?

Threads and the Google Talk scare

This is where it gets interesting. See; lately Facebook has decided to integrate their walled garden Twitter clone known as Threads with ActivityPub.

One argument against Threads federating boils down to the classic “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” policy Microsoft used to practice, and compares it to Google Talk. Now Google as a company is very notorious for creating something, and then killing it just a few months later. It’s to the point where there’s a website called the “Google Graveyard” listing products Google killed off. One such product was Google Talk; which was an XMPP messaging service Google ran, competing with AIM, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Skype, and numerous less popular (in the USA) messengers such as ICQ, Xfire, and more. It didn’t exactly seem to be that popular given nobody I knew back then used it, and it was killed one day when Google replaced the multiple chat services they had with Hangouts (which in Google fashion was also killed off for yet another app called Google Chat and Google Meet or something, why can’t Google be consistent?).

But the canon as written by users online, regardless of how true it is or regardless of Google’s track record goes “once upon a time there was this chat client named XMPP, it was the best thing ever, and then Google ruined it” and this is backed up by a blogpost that claims this, along with a viral Mastodon post parroting this and saying that users will be forced into threads to federate. In fact, it pins the issues on XMPP solely on Google almost, and not the problems with the protocol, how it took a while to add features, how much of the world sees XMPP as jank thanks to Avaya/Cisco software at their IT wagecage, and more. But most importantly; this was similar to the issue of say, Mastodon.social having most of the users on the fedi:

As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.

While XMPP still exist and is a very active community, it never recovered from this blow. Too high expectation with Google adoption led to a huge disappointment and a silent fall into oblivion. XMPP became niche. So niche that when group chats became all the rage (Slack, Discord), the free software community reinvented it (Matrix) to compete while group chats were already possible with XMPP. (Disclaimer: I’ve never studied the Matrix protocol so I have no idea how it technically compares with XMPP. I simply believe that it solves the same problem and compete in the same space as XMPP).

Now when you look at the “instance question”, instance blocking, and how many of these instances just so happen to go down because the admin quit, it’s easy to see why everyone would trust Google for XMPP instead. If you had to ask your coworker if he would trust an internet tough guy or the powertripping manager being in control of his online life or Google, he’d trust Google because he has “nothing to hide”. The post then compares Facebook joining the fediverse to a company with no focus and Microsoft. But the cherry on top is this part:

I know we all dream of having all our friends and family on the Fediverse so we can avoid proprietary networks completely. But the Fediverse is not looking for market dominance or profit. The Fediverse is not looking for growth. It is offering a place for freedom. People joining the Fediverse are those looking for freedom. If people are not ready or are not looking for freedom, that’s fine. They have the right to stay on proprietary platforms. We should not force them into the Fediverse. We should not try to include as many people as we can at all cost. We should be honest and ensure people join the Fediverse because they share some of the values behind it.

By competing against Meta in the brainless growth-at-all-cost ideology, we are certain to lose. They are the master of that game. They are trying to bring everyone in their field, to make people compete against them using the weapons they are selling.

Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer.

Right; that’s cool. Let’s see what his instance is blocking:

Well we do have a few instances blocked, but I’m sure if more people talked to his instance or his instance was in the anglosphere they’d be blocked, given it’s a smallish instance with only 2.9k users. Let’s see how the instance bugged by Meta to federate fares:

And what about the one with the guy making the viral thread and linking that post saying fedi should be free speech:

Are you noticing something? These instances only approve of the freespeech.org kind of free speech, the free speech that’s as free as the local radio station owned by Clear Channel playing only approved music is edgy and anti-establishment.

I’m very curious to watch this unfold, given the rumors that Facebook is also being selective about who they federate with (I’m sure they don’t want people posting many kinds of memes), and how internet leftists act online. What I do know is Eugen is onboard with it.

But what does this all have to do with what I said earlier? Right. So basically; there’s now big tech companies dipping their toes in this new defederated thing. I suspect there will be people flocking to these because just like mastodon.social, being on there means you’re far less likely to be blocked if you are a system enjoyer. After all, right now it’s really trendy to talk about how the “hate speech and disinformation” on Twitter, but telling someone the fediverse has none of that is like pranking someone by telling them that the part of town you know is sketchy is a beautiful neighborhood you can walk at night or leave your door unlocked in.

But with how big tech companies and the like think Mastodon is the future, who knows how it’ll be in a few years when it’s no longer cool, and associated with the chuds and lolisho posters. It sounds crazy, but look what happened to crypto. One day it was the cool thing that was going to change the world…the next thing you know the SPLC is trying to track everyone on their shitlist who uses it:

Maybe that will be the fedi in 5 years if shitty startups and big tech can’t exactly grasp it; something extremely tainted that nobody who isn’t in the in group will want to touch, maybe it’ll be normal for instances to have to run with no frontends or with APIs locked down to avoid censorship, who knows. After all; this is part and parcel with running a containment site. Right next to names of someone who could be considered remotely far-right like Kevin MacDonald and Richard Spencer, are names of libertarians and sites run by such including Luke Smith, Kiwi Farms, Cody Wilson, altcensored.com (a website that in their own words is nonpolitical and just logs videos YouTube hides/censors), and even boomer conservatives like Laura Loomer.

I guess my point here is, the last remnants of the internet are on containment sites, websites made in reaction to other sites fail because they offer nothing if you are not banned from Twitter, and I hope if you’re for free speech you’re willing to see your picture and real name next to that of Alex Jones, Andrew Anglin, and Kiwi Farms because that’s what you’ll have to put up with (and many people online just aren’t).

Musk always wins

So how am I going to end this schizopost? By saying that no matter what you do, Elon Musk always wins and so do walled gardens. Everyone on the fediverse is constantly infighting and trying to do every song and dance to avoid being blocked; thanks to the consensus filter. You don’t want to be a bigot, do you?

Case in point; a friend’s artist girlfriend is on the fedi and BlueSky. He cannot follow her on fedi or share his art because of signed fetches and being on mastodon.art’s blocklist (she uses Mastodon.art). But on BlueSky, the monolithic platform, he can follow and reshare her art. Sure, you’ll get jannied from Bluesky if you post lolisho or get report bombed or similar. But since you’re blocked from another site for something that the website owner decided (with no way to negotiate it), this situation will keep playing itself out more and more until you go to a monolithic website where you don’t have to worry about instance blocks, only if you’re banned or not.

Basically, Elon Musk always wins if you don’t say funny words online that start with an N. No matter where you go, you’ll find out you can’t repost the guy you liked because he used this instance that blocks stuff (and he won’t move instances), and you’ll be back. He will too when he asks why nobody interacts with his posts.

You don’t understand, I need my internet daddy!

Not long ago, a previous blog post I made talked about how the difference between the Mastodon side of the fediverse and the rest of the fediverse boiled down to one thing. One side wants to use the fediverse to escape social media platforms, and one side wants to use it because Twitter isn’t censoring hard enough. There was one glaring flaw in this however, and that is I forgot a group that lands somewhere in between the two; users with Musk Derangement Syndrome.

See Elon Musk has had an interesting career. A decade ago his company was a favorite of the left; in particular because while traditional automakers were caught in emission scandals, only selling hybrids in 3-4 states to boost CAFE (fuel economy) numbers, or being painted as the force of evil thanks to the infamous GM EV1 fiasco (tl;dr, GM made an electric car, pushed it hard, and then because it was a lease made all the owners give them back to be crushed), Elon Musk didn’t care. He tripled down on what he saw the future was: battery electric powered cars. While the other companies seemed to not care about alternatives such as Hydrogen (which has zero infrastructure, not merely limited) and VW/other European companies completely fumbled the ball with the diesel emission scandals, Tesla was making electric cars and actually selling them.

I say selling instead of marketing them because until 2023, Tesla didn’t even need to market because the word of mouth was just that huge. They didn’t need to run ads as they were the darling of every single green car blog, politicians were driving them as status symbols, with owners who just love gloating about not paying high prices at the pump. In fact, Tesla might as well have taken the Apple model of “reality distortion field” and applied it to the car industry, mixing the brand worship of Apple with the smug comment warfare of internet liberals and creating a sales success.

And then Elon Musk became known for mean tweets and not exactly being left wing, and that’s when the hit pieces began. I wish I had a timeline on this because I’m disconnected from whatever the TV is saying these days, but I’ll say this. With Donald Trump out (after creating a cottage industry of balding men trying to be the first to reply to a Donald Trump tweet), the same reply guys who obsessed over him changed their focus to Elon Musk. Sure, the mainstream media theatrics are still focused on some show trial and “TRUMP SAID A THING”, but online there are a lot of people angry at Elon Musk. Now Twitter was very notorious for doing a lot of suspicious things under it’s previous CEOs, which were then confirmed with the Twitter Files posts, but most importantly a switch went off and suddenly the cattle on Twitter began to realize they had been getting screwed over. Of course, as they’re unable to rationalize it any other way the hate was directed at Elon Musk. This was made worse by the fact that Twitter’s useless staff who had been fired were really, really, good at theatrics for the Twitter crowd.

While this was going down, many Twitter midwits angry at Tesla Man needed a new place to go to. So these users went to the fediverse, because they heard it was just like Twitter but without the Tesla man in charge. Unsurprisingly they’ve been kind of pissed off at the community. As you’d expect, they’ve been clashing with the Mastodon side over not talking like a Tumblr user (using CWs for everything, alt-text, the whole 9 yards) but there’s something else I find interesting. These people have never ever been in a social media network without algorithms and coddling.

The Fedi Difference ™

The fediverse is not like a normal social network. The fediverse timeline seems to act more akin to an RSS feed or the old-school Twitter timeline as opposed to the modern Twitter timeline which can hide posts without you knowing, shove posts in your face, and whatnot at will. If you think finding yourself either next to Tumblr users screaming that you didn’t CW a picture of your burger and fries or racism enjoyers into anime girls was a culture shock, it’s another one to realize that there’s no magical algorithm on the site. This is by design, one side will think it’s how hate speech and literal genocide spreads, and the other side will say it censors people with “shadowbans” or “throttles” (and as it came out as well, had some connections with the FBI). Others will say it kills their engagement online.

On the fediverse, there is none of this, especially if you run an instance yourself. Your timeline is what you are fed from who you follow, period, with a “whole known network” timeline being for content from instances yours knows about (that haven’t had federation broken thanks to Signed/Authorized fetches or are in your instances blacklist). There are no centralized moderators deleting posts or hiding content that might seem “spammy” to you, like frequent posters. But most importantly, you can’t click a button to make it go away.

This is an extreme culture shock to anyone expecting an algorithm (but not that one). There are none, period. The closest thing to one is Mastodon with it’s explore function that can be seen on many instances such as Mastodon.social giving you posts that are liked by people the instance knows about. In fact, if you go to many instances with Mastodon 4.x, you will see this tab. Let’s see what’s on Mastodon.soc…oh wait this is way too on the nose. Darn it.

Let’s scroll some, yeah that’s more like it. Safe /r/all level posts and “Trump bad”.

Okay that’s odd. Let’s see what it’s like on a retrotech instance:

I don’t need to go further, you get the point already. The trending tabs on Mastodon are the same kinds of garbage you can find on Twitter and as I’ve mentioned in the previous post, the instances are also run by the same kinds of people who ran Twitter into the ground. But otherwise, there’s not an algorithm on the main timeline to my knowledge, or for your replies, and whatnot. I know Pleroma lacks one, that’s for sure. This matters, because it’s leading into the point I’m making here today.

Some people do need a walled garden

Now that I’ve mentioned just how much of a culture shock it is using the fedi as opposed to Twitter, let’s talk about a recent meltdown. A lot of tech enthusiasts have been moving to Mastodon because they know the computer thing, and this means that ecelebs in that circle are naturally following them. Case in point; Technology Connections. He’s a YouTuber who has managed to win the algorithm game with videos like “here’s something nifty that you never bothered to look into”, with very autistic video topics.

Unfortunately, his autism that allows him to get massive numbers of views talking about “cool things you never noticed” extends to his social life and this is where the fun begins. Technology Connections has been posting a lot of greatest hits on the fediverse for the past few weeks, including but not limited to “I wish I could control what people say about me online”:

To feeling he’s being gangstalked:

To wishing the moderator in the sky would take care of posts:

While then in the same thread telling people he’ll take on anyone in a fedi fight:

Despite all these complaints about the network, he cannot just leave it. In fact, he drops his handle in a video description for a video he uploaded four days ago:

Older videos of his on the flipside have Twitter links, which is now private because Musk Bad.

Now while these posts are funny, they’re not why I’m sharing them. The point of me sharing them is simple. It’s to illustrate a third type of user on the fediverse. He really wants old Twitter to come back, as in 2019-2020 Twitter. Not of course the Twitter which as one viral tweet said, would let you tell random people how to cook crack in the microwave. Nah, he wants the Twitter of shadowbans where the “quality filter caught most insufferable people”. On Twitter he was an e-celeb and could feel like a king. On the fediverse he’s a nobody to many people, an example of never meet your heroes to others, and an episode of the Jerry Springer show to yet another group. It’s just they’re now shouting “WORLD STARRRRR” or posting it to rdrama.net instead of shouting “JERRY JERRY JERRY”. This of course is either an ego dent, or a situation he’s never had to handle in his life.

Now imagine a lot of people online, used to the reporting tools and blocking tools of Twitter.com, thrust into an online sphere where they have no power. Where someone could be shit talking you online and you wouldn’t even know, it wouldn’t even pop up in the Google Alert under your own usernames and real name. Where the person you blocked can still see your posts if they federate to him, enough to call you names online that you’ll never see. This absolutely breaks this third demographic on the fediverse; since unlike Kiwi Farms or 4chan or rdrama or whatever scrapegoat exists this month, it’s at your doorstep and you can’t even clean it up or call for someone to. After all, Mastodon reports go to the owner of the instance who reported it. And just like Kiwi Farms handling people sending takedown emails, many times they will even be posted publicly.

Arguably you could say his posts were intended for a different purpose, to make Mastodon developers add in algorithms and similar to reduce harassment, but the userbase of Mastodon does not want this. In fact, you could argue it would silence trans and BIPOC voices just like how HP webcams were racist. He’s also not the first person who would call for such a thing, if anything he’d be the 300^th idea guy to this week. He will either have to get used to it, or log off of social media for his own mental health because Twitter right before Elon Musk took over is never going to come back unless the US government steps in and sells it to Google or the ADL or something.

In other words, the fediverse is not Twitter. If it’s getting to you, just log off instead of aggravating the situation and trying to fight everyone.

If you can’t block em, block em harder: Feditext and hard coded client blocklists

Previously, I’ve made other posts about some of the various cancers on the fediverse, be it signed fetches or carpet blocklists. I’ve also made a post about how the marketing efforts of the Mastodon crowd and forced division have created a “what instance should I join/recommend” issue. These 3 posts summarize many of the problems with the fediverse including the lack of transparency behind the blocks, but there’s one more trick that has been done with a few fediverse clients (Tusky is one example) but taken to new extremes. This client summarizes everything wrong with the Mastodon side of the fediverse, but also illustrates why it’s going to fail.

Feditext: when the blocks are built in

Today I heard about drama involving a fediverse client known as Feditext, and what the creator has done to the users of the client. Now on phones, fediverse/social media clients or “apps” are massively popular. These offer the polish of a phone app, linked into your website of choice. In fact, this is one of the reasons Gab moved to a modified Mastodon software stack, the developers wanted to take advantage of the wide array of Mastodon apps that exist (Gab is banned from the app store). This resulted in a giant flamewar in 2019 leading F-Droid to even issue a statement as some developers chose to block “problematic” instances at a client level to “own the chuds”. After all this though two apps stood out for their stance to not block instances, Fedilab and Husky (a pleroma extended fork of Tusky, which did block instances). Server blocklists aren’t enough, you have to block the instances in the clients to get the mean people off the fediverse.

Anyhow, I really don’t know too much about what goes on in the Apple ecosystem and I could care less because I’m not a fan of heavily locked down phones that are literally security theater, but I’ve heard about this new fediverse app called Feditext that is pulling the same behavior. The backstory for this app is this; there was this Mastodon app called Metatext for it and then the developer got sick and it was abandoned. Then someone else made a fork of it and now it’s on Github, even though it hasn’t been touched in 5 months. I never heard of it, so I popped it in the biggest search engine and what do you know, there’s already the usual shibboleths. What a nice start. Something else you should notice is that Pleroma is conspicuously absent, there’s a good reason for this that I will explain why later. Also worth noting is that it’s not even on the app store, but only in test flight/beta mode. Nice.

Now normally this might have been a good app. Maybe it’s not. I don’t know, I don’t own an iPhone and I’d rather not own one. If I wanted to impress trashy women in the parking lot of Wal-Mart, I’d get myself a used BMW on Craigslist or Copart or something. But there’s just one small problem. You see, the developers of this app love to hardcode blocklists in, and this is how I found this app, through a fediverse thread talking about it. The first post is of a screenshot interaction with the developers of this client with the OP of the fediverse thread, puzzled by the fact that a blocklist would be baked into a client.

After being unable to find stereophonic.space in the code itself, a fedi user found out that in “ServiceLayer/Sources/ServiceLayer/Services/InstanceURLService.swift“, there is a bloom filter in the code that compares instances.

Now the bloom filter itself is designed to be “unreadable” so that the darn CHUDS can’t read it. The code itself in the same file is also booby trapped so that you will get an “instance not supported” error if the instance is flagged as problematic. Essentially, the piece of code is a new version of the infamous “AARD code” that was used as evidence in court cases. Of course what happens is the user will end up one starring the app over this.

As it turns out, the obfuscated list reveals that a lot of fediverse instances popular in freer side of the fedi are blocked.

So why did I reveal the best for last (as in who made this client)? Well; here’s where it gets funny. The creator of this has a hard-on for blocking people online. One look at the fedi.software profile for Feditext tells you exactly who made this fork: none other than Vyr.

Now where have we heard the name Vyr before? Well, aside from being mentioned in my previous posts on the issue linked at the beginning, Vyr has a huge obsession with blocking bad people online. From an abandoned list for detecting and blocking Soapbox instances because of years old posts of the developer:

Which unblocks you if you run a fork of it (that might have issues, just because Alex Gleason is a stupid (keemstar.gif)):

To carpet blocking Pleroma instances because Alex Gleason used to be on the team (and the mean people run the instances but Akkoma is fine).

In short, when the control freaks can’t get power from making blocklists, they’ll work on fediverse client software and take the blocklists to the software itself. Even if you build the software itself, you have to strip out and modify the software to remove any sort of lists like this! It makes me wonder if this was the motive behind it, or if politics are just so ingrained in these people that they can’t let it go for 5 minutes. Maybe it’s both honestly.

When “Internet Tough Guys” program

One of the things to note with even FOSS software is that it’s very risky to trust software made by people who openly hate you, want you dead, and think it’s funny over some miniscule dispute online. This is a problem that is widespread and isn’t just limited to a single developer. Rather, it’s both the final form of “politics are everything” in programming while also being a classic longstanding FOSS problem; namely the “internet tough guy” problem. There are a lot of people who will sabotage their code and services or ignore bug reports and contributions to feel like badasses on the internet. Or maybe they want to do it to protest something, at the expense of everything else and their professional career.

Hector Martin, Drew Devault, and whoever is the guy behind GrapheneOS come to mind. Hell, even the XScreenSaver guy could count as one given he’ll send rants if you port his software to Windows (don’t do this, and especially don’t send him thugs kissing if he harasses you). Probably the most notorious example of all of these is the GrapheneOS saga. The guy behind it is notorious for a feud with Louis Rossmann, accusing him of all sorts of things to the point of sending Louis Rossmann hate texts and threats while Louis was making a video talking about this saga. In fact; he deleted GrapheneOS because the developer was such a loose cannon, he didn’t trust software written by him (all over a comment he had left on a video):

Internet tough guys can be really terrible for infrastructure critical projects, as the infamous npm colors saga or the npm package nuking your hard disk if it “thought” you were from Russia saga showed. Why would you trust a piece of software made by someone who will nuke your hard drive because he thinks you’re against the current thing?

Which is the problem with fediverse client software made by untrustworthy developers like this. Would you trust a fediverse client written and maintained by someone who has an inaccurate “bloom filter” done for the sole purpose of keeping mean people from using the client? Or would you trust one made by someone who might post on a problematic instance but has stated that software should just work?