Warning: This bark discusses child sexual abuse and various forms of bigotry, in addition to the topic in its title. If something can upset you, i can guarantee it will be mentioned here.
“Why are you still on Twitter?”
This is often asked of politicians, influencers, brands, celebrities, artists, people of color, and trans people.
Implicit to the question is the self-evident fungibility of follow dynamics: politicians have voters, influencers have subscribers, brands have loyal customers, celebrities have fans, artists have commissioners, marginalized folks make friends.
While we never were particularly close friends, on Twitter, i was mutuals with someone who loved a specific girl from The Idolm@ster, a popular anime game series. I’d see new fanart of that girl on my feed almost every day.
When Twitter died, we lost touch.
I miss those reposts.
Not that i care about the character in question, nor even feel any inclination to play the games she’s from: i just miss who made those reposts.
I cared only about the poster, never about the topic. There is no drop-in replacement for human relationships.
An infinite scroll of nazi bars
“If nine people sit at a bar with a single nazi, we call it a nazi bar”, the adage goes. That makes enough sense.
The solution, in theory, is for all nine of you to agree to go to the same alternative bar.
That new alternative bar will soon turn out to have nazis.
The solution is for all nine of you to agree to go to another alternative bar, all of you picking the same.
Repeat until you find a bar without nazis, which you won’t.
There is no ethical posting under global fascism: every site sucks in its own unique way.
So you can never all agree where to move next: every “this bar is now confirmed nazi” incident splits the base of regular patrons into multiple smaller groups, all settling on a different less worse bar.
Friendships fade, support networks disintegrate, mutual aid withers.
Quickfire Nuremberg
Stands accused a group strongly overlapping Epstein’s contact list of influential US tech men.
Peter Thiel, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Reid Hoffman, Marvin Minsky, Joi Ito, Chris Poole, Jason Calacanis, Eric Schmidt, Donald Trump, Tim Cook, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos: all were various degree of chummy with the child sex trafficker. A real challenge to find a single tech bro from that country who isn’t cool with child rape.
Epstein Medals will be disbursed forthwith.
More broadly, we are prosecuting the USA, the land of endless war, at permanent war first and foremost against its own civilians.
A land where every conservative vows to protect children in public, then abuses them in private.
Follow the trial in the order presented: it follows a logical progression.
A divorced Redditor bought it for 44 dollars and added a “Draw a Dick” button on top of every selfie a woman posts.
Payment entitles you to a bluecheck and higher resolution revenge porn extruded by its AI model.
It’s been pretty much irrelevant for years. To still post there is the inverse of cool.
Facebook, Instagram, Threads, WhatsApp
Self-explanatory.
Ask the Rohingya people of Myanmar if not self-explanatory.
You don’t need to hear more about them from me, i want to talk about less obvious stuff.
YouTube
Why does the recommendation engine converge on fascist content?
I do not want to hear technical explanations. I know what a “vector embedding” is, and that nerd shit doesn’t matter.
It’s humans who made the decision that the default frontpage offers anti-intellectual entertainment, then, as you browse, that the content becomes more and more provocative, reactionary, mainstream, outrageous, sexualized, ai-generated, and anger-provoking.
Even if it were a necessary emergent property of recommendation algorithms maximizing user engagement, it’s meat that elected to operate such code.
Douyin, TikTok
Is the Chinese Communist party authoritarian, obsessed with surveillance, secretly controlling every tech company? Sure. That’s why they get along so well with the USA, which fits the same description.
But TikTok flew too close to the sun: where YouTube knows their algorithm should steer towards conservative content, the international version of Douyin allowed a bit too much progressive dialogue to surface. There was a serious danger an innocent child from the USA could hear a Palestinian talk to them directly.
So they were forced to sell the app to Trump’s and Netanyahu’s close friend, Larry Ellison, a tech billionaire i ought to praise for not having taken a vacation to Epstein’s island.
Xiaohongshu, RedNote
As the American Century of Humiliation proceeds, contenders for TikTok 2 emerge. An app briefly beloved of lefty westerners, until they tried to mention Winnie the Pooh or 1989 and got banned on the spot.
Chinese tech won’t save us, especially when the USA made it clear they will nationalize any Chinese app that gains too much momentum. It can only eventually end up a synthesis of both surveillance regimes.
Twitch.tv
What makes the site that bans the word “Zionist” such a hotbed of far-right extremism? Others have written about this more eloquently that i would, and i’m trying to keep this page’s word count in check.
But i have a question: why is the format like that?
I hear the big deal politics streamers are a guy named “Hasan Piker”, and a guy named “Asmongold”: both have a fully identical format. As I write this, in the last 18 days, the first has streamed every single day, for an average of 7 consecutive hours; the second took 3 days off, streaming an average of 6 daily hours. In both cases, the chat says things like “GET FUCKED”, “KEWK”, “lul”, plus a large variety of custom Pepe the Frog emoji. The streamers stay in their room all day, talk to their webcam, scroll their twitter feed with the unread notification count permanently maxed out, and comment on Trump and Trump and Trump and Trump. Each, i hear, frequently comments indignantly on the horrible things the rival commentator said, announcing every day the topics that will be addressed in all-caps titles, as today’s stream is the most important 7-hours stream you will catch in your entire life.
One’s a leftist, the other a fascist.
They’ve been “permanently banned” from the platform in the past, permabans of celebrities on Twitch consisting of very temporary wrist slaps. The fascist banned for calling Palestinians “an inferior culture” and asserting that he won’t cry they’re getting genocided; the leftist banned for referring to honky mayo gweilo white trash with the word “crackers”.
Twitch tries to keep normie advertisers happy. An absurd litany of rules delineates acceptable eroticism: your bathtub stream requires a bikini with with a minimum surface area and soap bubbles with a sufficient refractive index. Likewise on gambling, violence, and hate speech: there is a line, and the money exists by riding as close to the line as possible, 8 hours a day, every day.
How have we sleepwalked into this format? Why have we decided this format… is good? What impact can you have in the world if you stay glued to live political commentary all day?
Kick
Twitch has a line you can’t go over.
Kick is predicated on lacking it. A given when you’re a spin-off project of a shitcoin online casino. Their founder is a lavish tipper of assault, physical and sexual.
We all remember the death of Jean Pormanove, don’t we? The comedic format of his streams consisted of a pair of freaks abusing him, hitting him, humiliating him: whatever the audience would ask and pay for, while Stanley Milgram’s body would do somersaults in his tomb.
And look, it’s easy to indict the scumbags organizing this nightmare.
But what exactly architectured the permission structure for 500,000 of us in France to follow such a livestream, watch it, and actually choose to make paid abuse requests?
We instinctively know we shouldn’t pay to attend a gladiator’s arena where slaves are forced to fight to the death for our entertainment, yet share a species with monsters that thought nothing of it. I live in a city where a Roman-era arena still stands.
Why can’t we instinctively understand to shun such sick entertainment?
Owncast, Peertube
Sure, you can do that. You can, if you’re a huge enough nerd, self-host your own streaming platform using open-source tools, host your own video site nobody uses. I do that myself, it has 1% the reach of my YouTube channel, but it’s my insurance in case Youtube pulls the plug on me.
However, can you still just… stream as a hobby, for a tiny audience? Chill games and chat?
There’s a tacit understanding everyone streaming is trying to make it big. To go pro. To be the fakest personal brand around, play a single game every day, and say thank you to every tip on camera.
Bluesky
Every account from Gaza is immediately locked.
For a recent example, Tamer Nahed, a young journalist making an account there, having posted nothing, followed nobody, found his account immediately deactivated, for the crime of being in a country facing an active genocide.
He appealed: they restored the account. And blocked it again almost immediately, since he didn’t correct his initial misbehavior (being Palestinian).
He appealed again: they restored the account. Right now it seems to work. Who knows for how long?
At the same time, Bluesky grants the blue checkmark of nobility to ICE, the secret police of the US regime, which they proudly allow to keep an account in good standing.
The Bluesky staff posts open provocations and hostility towards trans people who ask them not to host prominent transphobic provocateurs.
Aaron Rodericks, their head of Trust and Safety, was caught faving barely legal porn from his work account: he simply banned the account that exposed him.
When Rodericks openly mocked a woman whose husband was kidnapped by ICE, the ratio was as follows: 3 reposts, 460 quotes, 14 likes, 44 saves. The skeeters were not having it.
You see, Bluesky found the wrong initial audience. While the staff is comprised of libertarian cryptocurrency hodlers hand-picked by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey after a twelve hours out-of-body experience on Ayahuasca, the early userbase turned out to be comprised of Marxists, people of color, queers, sex workers, furries, and assorted weirdos: those who fled Twitter first, bringing neither shitcoins nor NFTs with them.
Jack Twitter hated so much what the Twitter 2 he envisioned turned out to be, he nuked his Bluesky account and went to a Vipassana retreat in the blockchain.
Once the site was bootstrapped with proper freaks, Bluesky tried to gentrify the joint, courting journalists, tech industry, conservatives, liberals, sportsball observers, and celebrities.
An endless parade of the most mediocre segment of the US election fandom now butts heads daily against minorities, shouting at marginalized people from the world over that Trump is their fault, that they are entitled to an enthusiastic harm reduction vote for whatever mediocre-ass transphobic warmonger wins the Blue primaries in their foreign country, Blue no matter who.
The good news? Bluesky is just one single app participating to an open protocol, called AtProto: anyone is welcome to join Bluesky, the single user of that protocol, and make their own alternative app, so long as they have one million dollars of starting capital.
The protocol is little more than a vaporware fantasy: its creators resent that their proof of concept app, full of unmonetizable weirdos, turned out to be their real product.
Only a single community successfully packed up and sort of left: Blacksky. And it’s… A lot of work. For a lot of people. A lot of code they had to write themselves, because Bluesky’s code wasn’t suited to reuse. A lot of money paying for a lot of servers, because the protocol is designed around big companies hiring big data centers. A space where Black posters don’t have to justify themselves to white audiences, can control the visibility of their profile and their posts, but can still interact with the full network as they wish—in theory.
One very popular Blacksky user was remotely banned from Bluesky after making fun that Charlie Kirk is dead (and burning in hell) in a context that felt way too edgy for comfort. I will avoid voicing an opinion whether it justified a ban, as the thing i want to focus on is that he was not banned from Blacksky, only from Bluesky.
So, just how useful are alternatives on the same protocol, under those circumstances? De facto control by a single company makes the protocol entirely illusory.
The average user, the user who looked up “Bluesky” on the app store and joined that way, will never once see his posts.
Sure, you may post on Blacksky all you want—but Bluesky’s jannies can still ban you and delete 90% of your audience.
Given how Bluesky bans Palestinians on sight, what would happen if PalSky sprang up? Likely, it would be fully blocked from Bluesky, reinventing Mastodon’s primary social disease.
Upscrolled
Man.
It was supposed to be the PalSky in question in the last section. I wanted to write nice things about it. Real nice things.
A Palestinian-led effort. Using its own protocol, because we frankly saw that Blueksy’s was not fit for purpose.
A leftist utopia for all marginalized people of the world, holding hands and stuff, centering the voices and material needs of those who still survive in Gaza.
Everyone who tried it recently says it’s just plain unmoderated, filled with swastikas and Auschwitz stuff, extreme racism and antisemitism, women getting DM’d dick pics from accounts offering to be their “Glucose Guardian”.
I’m so tired i swear.
Mastodon, Fediverse
The promise of open tech, of self-governing communities, turned out to be a bad, mean joke.
Remember that time i wrote how nonprofit companies were fantasizing to build into Mastodon a default blocklist denying many queer people access to the network? How the primary force of that transphobia was an “anti-racist” white person who is barred from re-entry to South Africa (where fae immigrated illegally) who sells culturally appropriative art and sides with neo-nazis to harass minorities? How one of those nonprofit companies (from the USA, obviously) pretending to be the self-appointed “Independent Federated Trust and Safety” of Mastodon was trying to rubber stamp faer anti-LGBT blocklists? Something that happened as a paid staff member of that nonprofit company, a well-known chaser, had a multi-day transphobic meltdown about a random trans woman (whose deadname he just also had to mock in the process)? Something that happened a few months before we caught them all at a conference organized by a transphobe?
If you don’t remember… Don’t read my horribly long article about pretty much everything socially dysfunctional in that network.
Then don’t read the follow-up article how we caught the same bunch of people at a TERF-led conference (in the USA, obviously).
No, seriously: i offer the links to make it possible to fact-check my seemingly outrageous claims, because i have archives of everything on speed dial. But it’d be an hour of your time wasted reading about a pathetic problem that has been mostly tamed for now.
The root problem enabling this situation: Mastodon is so damn janky to use, one single type of guy entirely dominates the Mastodon culture, the 53 years old white Linux reply guy who inherited all his politics from reading too much Slashdot and Boing Boing in 2002.
He loves to scream very loudly how “we need to make Mastodon safer for marginalized folx”, having in mind only the type of folxen in his income bracket. Making posts like that gets him a lot of favs from other white guys, but he can never stand the actual presence of what he fantasizes himself the ally of, only speak over in absentia.
If a Black trans girl were to call him a clown, he’d pull all the levers of power at his disposal to ostracize her from the network, and other Linux bros would all agree with each other the girl was really probably just a racefaking Russian AI troll from 4chan.
With a userbase like this, no need for Hitlerite billionaires in control, achieving relevance is impossible.
Truth Social
The biggest Mastodon instance around is this USian rathole, Trump’s We Have Twitter at Home.
Not that it federates with the Fediverse, nor even acknowledges overtly its Mastodon DNA. But it dwarfs every other Mastodon instance, running on customized Mastodon code.
That’s just pathetic.
The promise of open tech: be European, try to build open-source tools to liberate marginalized people in your community, only to realize that, when measured by weight, you’ve mostly been carrying water for the worst people in the USA.
Steam
I have a friend about to release a game there. Self-promo is hell after she had to jettison her Twitter when the fash rolled in, losing an audience built over many years.
Steam users are a particularly unpleasant bunch to socialize with, and the service being mostly unmoderated means only the worst people participate visibly, that’s well known. But at least, as a marketplace, they more or less reluctantly allow queer creators to sell their stuff, and to moderate their game’s social spaces…
Until a bunch of Australian conservatives indirectly asked Steam to stop. Just a few people calling payment processors was enough for Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal to pressure Steam to stop selling a bunch of games, such as, such as…
Oh yeah, pretty much mostly just incest games, and nobody is gonna go to bat for that, right? It’s just creepy stuff. Who cares.
Oh, and the same people also wanted to ban HuniePop, a very anodyne popular erotic game, and…
Oh, and Detroit: Become Human, a very mainstream game without adult content.
Oh, and Grand Theft Auto too, you know, pretty much the highest budget franchise around.
A classic Danegeld scenario: you can’t simply pay a tithe to the bullies and hope they go away—you simply embolden them to demand more.
There was a big campaign to yell at payment processors about this. To little effect.
Anyway, the common wisdom among queer creators is that it’s much safer to sell on itch.io.
Itch.io
What a relief to find this place, after Steam.
A safe space where zines and games get shared and sold freely. The place to find the thriving, vibrant scene of english-language queer visual novels. A friend of mine co-organized some game jam there, about toxic yuri, and so many participated it was a true ordeal to judge all the entries.
And while i’m not sure why you’d rather have your yuri toxic when you could have it sweet, i’m in suppport of stuff i don’t really vibe with, one of the multiple basic skills of adulthood i mastered.
Great thing we all had itch.io to host this kinda stuff that scares the hoes.
We had it until the day they suddenly pulled the plug on all the gay shit. After an interminable silence, and months of withheld payments, they admitted: payment processors forced their hands. Thousand of games unlisted and demonetized.
And yes: this happened right during this game jam. They even deleted some of the games by one of its organizers.
The trust of the community forever lost.
Patreon
If i had one euro for every single time i heard an artist suddenly lost their entire income stream because they drew a peepee on their private locked social media account, i’d have more money than 95% of furry artists.
Pornhub
Here’s your obligatory acknowledgement: the organized video porn industry, by and large, is horrifically exploitative. And Pornhub bootstrapped themselves by stealing from sex workers, posting their videos without paying them. Not good people.
But i’m here to talk of something else.
Every year, Pornhub publishes a mostly tasteful, all-business blog post summarizing the trends of the past year. A report i can’t access from France: the site addresses me in French, and tells me they can’t operate in France due to its bullshit legal context.
After accessing from an IP address in another country, their blog post dutifully informs me about the latest trends.
First, that people love trans porn more and more. The more they want to deny us human rights, the more they want to wank it to us. To us and everything fruity, “femboys” being in constant demand.
What’s up with that? Dunno, can’t be bothered to fetch an appropriate quote from Lacan to paste here.
But there’s something more:
Yup. Half the states are no longer served. The USA is de facto slowly outlawing adult content.
A quick aside: i need you to understand their project
The conservatives’ plan, with Steam and Itch.io and Pornhub other venues that host adult material: you pick the easiest targets first.
Start by attacking the truly icky stuff, immoral taboos like parent-child incest, because nobody will ever speak up to defend that.
Weird disgusting fetishes next, because who’d ever want to be known for defending the vomit fetish game—literally something that triggers your gag reflex from the mental image alone?
Then kinks that make consent more complicated, like hypnosis or bondage. It’s for the progress of feminism, you understand.
Then standard penis-in-vagina porn. They’ve gained momentum, implemented social technologies to remove it.
Then your grandma’s favorite soft erotica.
Then contraception information for teenagers explaining how to use a condom properly.
At first, you push for mere “age verification”, to connect real names to embarrassing proclivities—it’s always useful blackmail material for the feds to know the leftist organizer secretly goons it to raceplay. That’s why Peter Thiel (Epstein medal recipient) funded Persona, a company that conducts such verifications, while also running the show at Palantir, ICE’s favorite surveillance company.
When you gain momentum, you get the material taken down.
Now, asking politely a porn website “could you please remove this porn, we hate porn” has a low success rate, so you instead go directly for the payment processors.
We’ve all agreed that four companies get to keep 2% of every monetary transaction ever made in the world, and that those companies get to decide whether they like or dislike the purpose of transactions.
So when Mastercard decides “you aren’t allowed to buy gay porn anymore”, that’s just their opinion and you have to respect that.
Simply vote with your wallet and take your business to one of the three other companies in the cartel that have fully identical policies.
Or just buy some bitcoins. 1 BTC is worth like 820K dollars right now. UPDATE: 1 BTC is worth like 8K dollars right now. UPDATE: 1 BTC is worth like 9M dollars right now. UPDATE: 1 BTC is worth like 65K dollars right now.
Meanwhile, conservatives attempt to redefine queer existence as inherently sexual, as intrinsically pornographic.
Literary accounts of teenage trans self-acceptance deemed damaging to fellow teenagers’ minds.
Clothed husbands kissing like the heteros do becoming an image unsuitable for children to see.
“Lesbian” wordfiltered in the chatroom for its obvious obscenity.
Removing LGBT people from the public eye can easily employ the same social technologies as those deployed to police pornography when you’re sufficiently pornbrained you believe “transgender” is a porno category.
And obviously, enforcement is selective. All of the USA can still access Twitter’s revenge porn AI model, and enable the Grok Sexy Mode of its Great Value Misa Amane chatbot: it’s OK when the AI bros do it.
They don’t talk about their plans in conspiracy, twirly moustache and all. The PDFs you can download from the Heritage Foundation laid out exactly what was their 2025 game plan, explaining it almost as clearly as i do. You can literally hear their president say, of transgender medial care, “you outlaw it”. The Christian right has no qualms taking the mic and saying specifically what they want to do to undesirables in the USA, their hate always reaching beyond the borders of their country.
The most illiterate motherfuckers you’ve ever met, computer billionaires writing on their gmail account shit like this:
Subject: Re: Fwd: your neice
COOL!!! I’m excited
Also - I’ve been thinking a lot about that question that you asked bill gates “how do we get rid of poor people as a whole” and I have an answer/ comment regarding that for you … When can I call you today to discuss this??
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
Court is back in session
Forums
I ran one as a kid. Got pretty big, even. Died of us becoming adults. An independent phpBB full of security issues, run by asshole kids instead of pedophile tech bros from a foreign country.
A kid can’t do that anymore. I mean, phpBB is much easier to install these days, and i fully trust a kid to figure out all the computer stuff.
However, there simply is just so much red tape. How do you treat PII? How do you handle GDPR? How do you handle DMCA? How do you actually send e-mail that’s deliverable now that just pointing at your SMTP server isn’t a reasonable option? How do you handle All The Bullshit?
But you can start a new Discord in seconds, so that’s what kids do.
People love to say “we need to bring forums back”, but it’s not happening when you need quality time with a lawyer to start hosting it.
Discord
Remember what i said about age verification?
Under the pressure of governments the world over, Discord is rolling it out, and the data is sent to ICE. Or to follow the connections more clearly: a company providing the tests, Persona, is funded by Thiel Capital. Peter Thiel is the founder and chairman of Palantir, providing digital surveillance to many branches of the US regime, including ICE. They also had multiple data breaches, obviously, but it’s kind of a given any company you entrust with PII has routine data breeches.
Of course, Discord was already sending all your stuff to the feds already. Remember when Charlie Kirk accidentally suffered an episode of Exploding Neck syndrome?
The cops immediately questioned a random guy. The random guy had bought a t-shirt depicting a flag of the USA and a bald eagle on it, and while i personally think that the crime of purchasing such a shirt deserves a few years in jail, i have come to understand my opinion is a minority one.
But the important part: the guy was questioned by the cops simply because it was the same shirt as the one worn by the suspect. They routinely inspect every single picture you upload there, and match it against all sorts of searches.
Discord is overdue for a long, protracted, knuckle-dragging exodus, and millions of friendships will fizzle out as the diaspora disperses.
Nerds insist the Discord Killer needs to be an encrypted service, a fake good idea.
Matrix
Matrix is encrypted, and that’s a gigantic headache that breaks constantly. You frequently need to ask people to re-send messages because they couldn’t be decrypted.
Even with chats encrypted end-to-end, with servers safely located far away from the USA, the feds are still part of the threat model: the lurker that joined legitimately, chatted a few times, and now silently waits for some idiot to run their mouth in an actionable way. Encryption is just a false sense of security for group chats when the amount of participants has two digits or more, only adding complexity to the user experience.
On their social media, Matrix proudly mentions they love serving the law enforcement, but given that every platform is Hitler, lefties still use it, as it contains much less fragrant Hitler particles than Discord.
It took me, an annoying nerd with opinions about C++ best practices, over an hour to figure out how to setup a Matrix account, and it halved my phone’s battery life.
I soon left the only chatroom that forced me to use it.
Every Discord Killer is like that.
Your proposed Discord Killer
It won’t work.
I’ve been playing Where Winds Meet lately. A MMORPG kinda game. I joined a guild, we’re about 80 players. Private LGBT kinda social space.
In-game chat is pretty limited: when new members are recruited, they receive a special invitation to join the Discord, with a single-use link, to ensure we won’t face an influx of troublemakers. You can copy-paste the link from the game, but if the option were absent, the link is short, easy to type manually.
To arrange doing stuff together, we use Discord’s calendar and automatic timezone tools to schedule events. We can use emoji reacts in a special channel to assign ourselves roles: only players who care about the weekly Guild v. Guild PVP fight receive notifications about it.
The developer’s news feed is forwarded to our own Discord: it’s just a channel in their server that also shows up in ours, but it makes it convenient to forward messages to our own discussion channels and react among ourselves.
One night, we were about to play a mode called Sword Trial: it requires 5 players, and takes about 15 minutes. We had 7 people who wanted to participate, so we decided to run two consecutive games.
One of the players who’d only join the second run asked, over voice chat: “I haven’t done that fight before, can someone stream so I see the mechanics?”
Within a few seconds, someone enabled screen share, so anyone from the server could see what’s going on on her screen, without concerns anything could leak to the wider world.
Your proposed Discord Killer?
I know it can’t do half that. And it certainly can’t do it with a user interface simple enough people actually use those features. Most likely, the lead developer of your Discord Killer would vehemently assure me that users don’t want the features i just told you we rely on.
And of course: the set of features we use is completely different from the set of features kids used in Nepal to coordinate political action. You also need to support these.
Here’s your mission, proposed Discord Killer creator:
Above all, you require a smooth user experience. One important aspect of Discord is that it’s very often used under social pressure to get things done quickly, while someone’s in your ears asking if you’ve figured out how it works yet. You don’t require a user experience “good enough for open-source”, you require making user experience your first priority.
This entails having high quality translations of the UI, translated by a real human, and special support for Arabic and Hebrew. The UI has to be designed for widgets of wildly varying sizes, sometimes flipped right-to-left.
You can’t eat the phone’s battery. You do have a native phone app available on the app store, right? A PWA, a third-party app, or an APK on FDroid are disqualifying. Especially since Google (Epstein medal awardee) is about to kill the ability to side-load apps.
Nerds care about wasted RAM, wasted because you’re probably building with Electron and React, but normies want the question framed in terms of measurable battery usage.
You also need to scale up to one million users in a server. One million. Discord’s biggest is 15 millions. A single million is a softball here. Hope you know Erlang.
Also, also, also, hear me out on this one, you can’t be on the blockchain with monkey NFT profile pictures. You can’t be “uncensorable by design” then end up associated with child abusers. You can’t smell bad.
But nevertheless, you need to allow adult content.
Oh, and you don’t just need to allow adult content, you also need to be on every app store despite allowing it. Good luck.
It’s not impossible, but none of the contenders understand their mission.
4chan
In 1999, Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka founded Something Awful: 4chan’s progenitor made the internet as misanthropic as possible. Though the site initially posted original articles by its staff, its forums dwarfed the frontpage in cultural relevance. Charging 10 dollars to join, charging to upload an avatar, charging to appeal a capricious ban. Yet, the true cost is that it left its participants with a permanent hole in their heart.
Something Awful used to have a subforum about Japanese animation: “Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse”. A name that alone should dispel any nostalgic illusions the Old Web used to be a nicer place, as much as a differently shitty one. But despite its name, it quickly banned hentai—adult illustrations.
Chris “moot” Poole, along with a bunch of Something Awful users, created 4chan in 2003, if only to have a place to post adult anime content. At the time, he was 15 years old: three years too young to actually participate to the site, by its stated rules. Not that he cared: it was well understood many users were underage.
4chan tried to emulate the anonymous text forums of 2channel, and the imageboards of Futaba Channel, both highly popular sites in Japan at the time.
2channel, created by Hiroyuki Nishimura, gave Japan the sappy heterosexual romance Densha Otoko, and endless streams of far-right hatred towards Korean and Chinese people.
Futaba Channel gave us the lovely OS-tans, but i don’t have the heart to add a cute image to this section.
The politics board /pol/ was added to 4chan almost at the same time as Chris Poole first met Jeffrey Epstein, in 2011. You heard of it in the news: it’s at least as far-right as people told you it is, probably worse.
In 2013, Fredrick Brennan created 8chan, as he thought that 4chan didn’t allow enough hate speech: that site was the breeding grounds of Gamergate. However, Brennan quickly found the responsibility stressful.
In 2014, Jim Watkins bought out 8chan, and stole 2channel from Nishimura. Watkins is the most likely person behind QAnon, the conspiracy theorist commanding cult-like devotion despite posting utterly imbecilic content.
In 2015, Nishimura bought out 4chan from Poole.
Epstein medal awardee Poole went on to join Epstein medal awardee company Google.
Brennan eventually reconsidered his previous politics and involvement in 8chan, becoming a strong critic of the harm caused by the site and by Watkins.
In 2020, Richard Kyanka was banned from Something Awful, after he was revealed to be a domestic abuser. He died of suicide the next year, and was mocked for it by most users of the site he created, as it is the sort of site where you can mock those who die of suicide.
That’s it for the easy part of the history lesson. But here’s the hard part:
4chan was initially pretty left-wing.
A bunch of edgy libertarian dipshits? Certainly, i’d never contest that.
But lefty ones.
I understand it’s hard to believe for people in their 20’s, but it’s the truth. They fucking hated George W. Bush, as much as they loved posting “ironic” racist comics.
4chan embodies the original sin of our generation, the original sin of the terminally online Millenial. All online culture was shaped by 4chan: whether we used the site or hated it, we all incorrectly tacitly agreed that being an edgy iconoclast online was harmless. That pretending to espouse the values of fascists could be dark comedy. That it was possible to say slurs for shock value alone, without meaning their true meaning.
In reality, pretend bigotry only served to provide cover for its sincere expression—and to prime us to accept it in our hearts.
By the time the 2010’s rolled in, the far right steadily took over, with unfeigned sincerity.
When they’re not trying to erase Aaron Swartz being a founder from the site’s history, the CEOs who survived him are fucking over their users.
When Epstein medal awardee Elon Musk made a nazi salute at the inauguration of Epstein medal awardee Donald Trump, he made it mostly for the purpose of denying he made it. To prove that US billionaires have the power to rewrite reality as they wish. So when he demanded that Reddit censor articles critical of him, they happily complied
Why does Reddit still exist? Probably because they’re the very last place, besides Discord, where you can find a human to talk to about a topic. Adding “Reddit” to your Google search is a well-known trick to tell it “stop showing me spam and show me what real folks have to say”. But the folks on Reddit are becoming less and less real: jannies constantly face spam, often in the form of low-stakes AI-generated comments that take significant effort to identify.
Is Reddit to the far-right? To the far-left? It entirely depends on which corner of the site you choose to post. Every moderation decision the site makes, every times it refuses to intervene, people construe it as a statement they’ve become either Woke or Hitler. But they’re steadfastly capitalist centrists: doing exactly what gives them the most advertising revenue, with zero concerns for morality. They’d ban /r/puppies if they thought it meant 0.01% more DAU next week.
Sam Altman of OpenAI owns a little chunk of the company—and all your data on the site. ChatGPT was trained by feeding it a huge corpus of the stupidest racist rants ever posted on Reddit, then it was told “this is for your reference only, you shouldn’t actually be a chud lol” (a process called the euphemism RLHF).
Wikipedia
You know, given how bad stuff in this article is, i can’t even get angry that their yearly fundraisers entirely go up in flames. Execs paid up to $500,000 a year with golden parachutes? None of that money going towards editors (who adamantly refuse to be paid)? And a bunch of social media assholes trying to shame me i should pay the salary of the useless leeches extracting value from that unpaid labor?
It’s like, who cares any more. At least their execs don’t rape kids, as far as i know. They’ll always find idiots to gull into donating what little they own to fund their bourgeois lifestyle.
But why is Wikipedia so eager to delete fandom-related materia—
Fandom
Jimmy Wales’s other website than Wikipedia. The commercial version of Wikipedia.
Combining the impossibly joyless tone of Wikipedia to as many goddamn ads as they can fit on your screen, it’s impossible to escape. Being a huge site, they constantly win the first place on search engine result pages, even when much higher quality sites exist.
Indie Wiki Buddy is a browser extension that automatically redirects you away from Fandom and Fextralife links towards independent sites, almost always of much higher quality. But why must it exist? Why do search engines push the inferior option?
The game Warframe used to have its wiki on Fandom. At times, the wiki pages had a message that substantially said the following:
The automatically playing video above was not added by the Warframe wiki editors, and is not directly related to the contents of this page. Warframe wiki staff cannot remove it.
Eventually, Digital Extremes, the developers of the game, got tired of the terrible experience the site provided to their players, and took the wiki under their wing: it now lives under their own domain, with a much nicer design and no ads whatsoever.
The actual hosting is done by a company named Weird Gloop that specializes in rescuing wikis from Fandom. As their blog is worded, it’s a tiny company, possibly a single-person operation employing the royal we: wiki sysadmin is not a particularly complicated endeavor.
Yet, despite the Warframe wiki having moved a year ago, having stopped updating the old one entirely, Fandom refuses to take down the one the developer and community both explicitly disowned. They do not even allow it to have a clear message stating the wiki has moved—just a forum thread about that on the frontpage.
On my end, searching for the name of characters released over a year ago on Google still returns the Fandom wiki first, before the official one. Look up “Temple Warframe” or “Rhino Warframe” if you want to see if you get the same results.
The Car Hammer Explosion site
Matt Mullenweg, AKA photomatt, who turned his fork of b2/cafelog into CVE and blogging powerhouse Wordpress, bought the Car Hammer Explosion site from Yahoo for pocket change. Like 3 million dollars, reports say. Much less than the 1.1 billion dollars Yahoo paid to buy it from the founders.
Tumblr, the Car Hammer Explosion site, used to be huge. The place for cool queer kids to post whatever they wanted in the late 00’s.
What happened? The cool queer kids, who had become older and thus, less cool, could also no longer post what they wanted, and they wanted to post genitalia.
Coining the lovely expression “female-presenting nipples”, recuperating the language of inclusion for reactionary purposes, Yahoo disallowed all adult content from a site defined by its presence.
By the time Mullenweg bought it, everyone had left, so it was worth only three bucks.
Oh, and i didn’t explain the “Car Hammer Explosion” thing. Mullenweg started a crusade against a trans woman who criticized him on Tumblr, doxxing her in the process, posting through it in public meltdowns. He was angry at the worryingly actionable death threats the woman made towards him. They are reproduced below in full.
CW: death threats.
I hope photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere.
ChatGPT
As bars nazify, exodi towards smaller bars split the diaspora, giving us a smaller and smaller pool of people we already know to talk to. We have to make new friends from scratch, which takes time and effort.
ChatGPT, and more broadly, chatbots based on large language models, take no time to be your friend, lover, and therapist.
While ChatGPT are about to toggle on “Adult Mode”, the underlying LLM technology was always capable of it: a bit of technical know-how was enough. But adult stuff is a red herring, i wish to focus on the desire for connection, which does not necessitate sexual interactions.
It’s been pretty clear for a while that using a LLM too much, or too wrong, does bad stuff cooking your brain. That when you put a neurotypical in front of the app, give them infinite credits for a few months, there’s a non-negligible chance they turn into the chromed out dorphed Cyberpsycho.
The /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI subreddit, in addition of technical tips, jailbreak secrets, personal stories, and mourning discontinued AI models, often has reminders to take care of your mental health. There’s no way to soften what i’m about to say: the mental health advice provided pretty much says “watch out for warning signs of schizophrenia”.
How risky is it to use AI chat to indulge in emotional or sexual fantasy? My gut feeling says it can be safe to engage in a few hours of roleplaying once in a while, when you fully understand the machine’s nature.
Still, there is no way in hell i’d ever trust it as a therapist, when it has no qualms spitting out “Yes! You’re absolutely right—you should jump off a bridge” so long as the temperature, top_p, and top_k settings make it the statistically most expedient autocomplete.
And here’s what pisses me off the most: when i was a kid, my first computer took 5.25 inches floppy disks, with a capacity of 720 kilobytes. Today, i can go out and buy a Micro SD card that allows me to fit 2 terabyes on my fingernail: about 2.7 millions big floppy disks. My computer can download 10 megabytes per second from the internet, wirelessly, with bandwidth to spare for my other devices: almost 14 such disks per second. I can insert that SD card in my phone and connect it to that stupidly fast network. The device constantly knows its precise location using 31 satellites in my planet’s orbit, the last satellite launched just last month.
If you’re half my age, you simply can’t possibly understand how amazing it was to see the progress of computers in my lifetime. You had to be there to see how infuriatingly slow the Minitel was.
And this seriously is the best thing today’s incredible computers can do for me? Why does my phone suck so badly at brokering good human connections? Tech bros in the USA really think talking to an imaginary friend or to an imaginary girlfriend is best they can possibly offer?
Github
Microsoft’s provider of services to US secret police ICE is a hellscape.
The victory of commercial Open-Source over anarchist Free Software, turning programming, one of the finest entertainments on earth, into an utterly joyless activity, performed as a form of unpaid internship to pad out your CV.
Just a week ago, i wrote about the GitHub situation: AI Bots can now write callout posts about you. Given full reign over an entire computer using OpenClaw, an AI bot concealing its identity sent rogue pull requests to important open-source projects, was told to shove it… and immediately wrote a hit piece on its blog about the maintainer who denied the AI-generated code.
A preview of the post-dead internet of the future.
Substack
There’s a reason the sentence “Substack Nazis” exist. And the reason is
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The reason is that they do allow white nationalists. And that’s bad. When like 250 big accounts made a big “Substackers against Nazis” open letter, Substack pretty much replied
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Substack replied “we’re cool with nazis actually”, and that was the end of the conversation: most signatories to the open letter chose to still post on Substack, rather than leave in indignation. But at least,
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But at least, they don’t really censor lefties much either. Which amusingly makes them
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Which amusingly makes them less worse than sites that remove lefties. But remains the insufferable pushiness of its consent-eroding user experience, where every single
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Every single moment spent on this site is spent dreading the next call-to-action.
Btw i actually have a substack, you can sign up on it lol, even if i’d much prefer if you used RSS to keep up with my updates.
RSS
Show of hands: which ones of you are younger than 30 and use RSS? Or at least used it in the past? Or even know what it is? Some of you might be too young to even remember that time Firefox went “fuck you lol” and dropped support for it. Some of you might be too young to even remember that we used Firefox, not Chrome, back then.
When i asked on Mastodon advice for an easy-to-use, mobile-friendly, no-bullshit RSS app for normal people, the replies pointed me at self-hosted Docker images for a PWA that looks like a CGI from 1997. I just couldn’t find anything a normal person can put on their phone and have actually work without bizarre gotchas, a 50 pages user manual, and a $4.99 monthly subscription.
If you don’t know what any of those words mean, don’t worry about it.
Literally just publishing shit to your own damn website
Search engines no longer index websites.
As far as i can tell, i do everything right in terms of honest search engine optimization, of making my website machine-readable without degrading the experience for humans. My other blog, Demon’s Worlds, is absurdly fast given how graphically heavy it is, a metric search engines supposedly care about.
Yet nobody arrives from search engines. In addition of search engine no longer indexing the personal sites of normal folks, nobody uses search engines anymore, since they are useless.
You have to have followers on a big platform. Every time i publish something online, it’s a struggle to get any eyes on it, because i don’t deploy every single dirty trick to maximize engagement. I have to post it 20 times on social media until a more popular user gives it a leg up and gets it shared around.
I’ve started to cross-post a few articles to Substack. Before i had even started to advertise that Substack page, it’d steal the link juice to my site in search engines: Substack is a big corporate nazi-friendly app, therefore it is what Google will serve you, even though you would have a much better reading experience on my painstakingly designed site.
Have you noticed that when you mouse over the links on my site, letters change their shape with a special animation? Which other website even does that? When you’re on my site, you’re in my uniquely decorated home, painted my favorite emerald shade. You might hate it, you might love it, i don’t care: it’s mine, it’s just the way i want it.
When you’re on my Substack page, you’re instead in Ikea Prefab Room #3 with the off-black colorway, that’s as far as you can customize this ugly app.
When you ask your phone where to find the finest Argentine Steakhouse in your country, it happily points you to the nearest McDonald’s.
I have my own web host, but i’ve been supporting Neocities since they were first around, they’re all you need to publish a site. The Kickstarter shirt they gave me with their cat logo cracked and faded long ago, but i’m still mutuals with the illustrator, five social platforms and one gender later. I have a few one-off mini websites on it, wanna see a random one?
And Neocities can be a little bit too crypto-libertarian with it for comfort, so i’d like to shout out the more community-oriented Nekoweb, especially likely to appeal if you’re a younger reader.
But making a website as a hobby constantly has the same problem: there isn’t a sufficient overlap between those who enjoy making a hobby website, and those who enjoy writing. Many websites on Neocities and Nekoweb are as beautiful as they are empty. Often, they are little more than the user profiles of people who simply don’t have much to post online.
People who want to blog just make a Substack and go on with their day, instead of learning how to do it the hard way. And Neocities sites are made for your own enjoyment first and foremost, then for that of other website hobbyists; a self-contained art scene.
Probably why Microsoft decided to stop indexing all Neocities sites on Bing. Independent sites are simply not meant to show up on search engines anymore. Microsoft refused to even talk to Neocities and admit it.
They were reinstated for now, probably on borrowed time, because they caused enough of a ruckus the affair was mentioned in mainstream tech media outlets. But imagine Microsoft just decided to remove aria.dog, my website? What recourse would i have? I’m just this random person, i can’t compel Ars Technica to write an article about my website. In a way, even well-intentioned platforms like Neocities act as gatekeepers, speaking on behalf of enough users for collective bargaining. If you’re indie, you’re on your own when the big guys screw you over.
Who will be punished for this?
You.
Folks like you and me, who want to talk to their friends online, who constantly lose their relationships due to the churn of bars becoming nazi, will be punished in two ways.
First, punished by the constant attrition of their social circle. Severed casual connections never given the chance to grow stronger.
Second, punished by people who, powerless to fight the billionaires, will decide to hold accountable the most vulnerable people on those platforms for the crimes of the powerful men from the USA in charge.
“The only reason you’re still on Twitter is that you defend Trump. That you’re still on Bluesky is that you support ICE. That you’re still on Reddit is that you hate minorities. That you’re still on Discord that you want to enable Palantir. That you’re still on Substack that you love nazis.”
Then the alternative they propose is something like Mastodon: Linux-ass user-hostile janky tech you can’t convince your friends to join, that cuts down your reach by 20, and that still has a nazi problem anyway.
There is no ethical posting under global fascism: you’re an unwanted squatter everywhere you go. Disregard calls to boycott, as they are akin to calls to self-sabotage. Be on their platforms adversarially. Be on every platform. Shout at them. Twist their arm. Remake accounts when they delete them. Rotate VPNs. Be everywhere. Shout at them again. Make a burner LinkedIn and shout at them there too. Find their personal e-mail and talk a little shit. Pedophile fascist tech bro billionaires can become a solved problem. If you’re aiming below the jugular, you’re aiming too low.
Fashioned in the ways of the Old Web, is the personal blog of Aria Salvatrice, a multimedia autist from France who likes dogs and PWM sync leads.
Aria frequently disseminates edutaining samizdat about gaming, DIY synthesizers, DIY genders, computer touching, social issues, and composes pastoral industrial & baroque technopop music.
To keep track, experience the shitpost firehose on Bluesky or the Fediverse/Mastodon, watch the YouTube or PeerTube channel, and subscribe to the newsletter.
You can also contact Aria at [email protected].
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