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.